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| Albuquerque Dongcopter. Wonkette |
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Albuquerque Mayor's Race Roiled By DONGCOPTER
Wonkette
June 5, 2021
Area: Albuquerque, Santa Fe
The big political news in New Mexico this week was Tuesday's landslide-isn't-adequate-to-describe-it win by Democratic state Representative Melanie Stansbury in the special election to fill Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's congressional seat. But while the 60 percent to 36 percent stomping Stansbury delivered to Republican state Sen. Mark Moores will have important long-term implications for New Mexico politics, it was a plain vanilla "plane lands safely" story compared to Tuesday's other, far weirder political news in the Land of Enchantment.
That story, being, of course, the attack of the DONGCOPTER at a rally for Albuquerque mayoral candidate Manuel "Manny" Gonzales III, who currently serves as Bernalillo County Sheriff. As the Albuquerque Journal notes, the rally had started out well enough, with one of the biggest crowds Gonzales has had yet in his campaign to oust "fellow Democrat and incumbent Mayor Tim Keller." (The mayor's race is officially nonpartisan, so party affiliation won't be listed on the ballot. They are indeed Dems, although Gonzales is apparently some kind of law-n-order Trumper. Damned if any of it makes sense.)
Things got weird, in the form of a new kind of SKYPENIS, only this one at a far lower altitude than the others. While Gonzales was answering a question, a quadcopter drone dangling a dildo beneath it flew into the open-air venue, buzzing near the stage. As the audience giggled, an incredulous woman in the audience exclaimed, "Is that a dong on a drone?"
Here's a link to the video, which sadly cannot be embedded. Gonzales, clearly distracted — and who wouldn't be? — commented, "We have a gentleman over here who I guess is trying to be cute."
We pause here to compliment Journal reporter Elise Kaplan for this detailed description of the drone's being disarmed, or disdonged, by the venue's owner. It's the sort of keen-eyed journalism of which Pulitzer Prizes are made.
The owner of Revel Entertainment Center yanked the flying object – [sex] toy first – to the ground.
Things then got weirder, as you might expect in a Wonkette story about a DONGCOPTER.
As soon as the aeropeener was snatched out of the sky, a dude suddenly ran in and tried to wrest it from the owner of Revel Entertainment Center, then all these other dudes piled on him, and what the absolute fuck?
The dude who attempted the DONGCOPTER repatriation was arrested and identified as Kaelan Ashby Dreyer, 20. Dreyer was booked on charges of "misdemeanor battery and misdemeanor resisting, evading or obstructing an officer," and later released on his own recognizance. A complaint written by a sheriff's deputy said that Dreyer had shouted "He's a tyrant!" and was "swinging his balled up fist" at Gonzales.
Gonzales told the Journal he'd noticed Dreyer in the crowd while the DONGCOPTER was flying around, and while he didn't see Dreyer actually using a controller, he was pretty sure Dreyer was flying the remotely piloted tonker.
During the ensuing fracas, Gonzales said, "He tried to take a swing at me and he glanced across my arm [...] He struck me and I just took a step back. It wasn't anything I was very concerned about. I've been in a lot worse situations."
The complaint notes that Dreyer said he hadn't intended to hit Gonzales, but was very angry that Gonzales was "answering a question, from the crowd, in a disrespectful way," so there's your mandatory Rashomon: DONGCOPTER remix.
OK, there's also another bit of weirdness, why not? In a presser on Wednesday, Gonzales suggested the Mission Indongable incident was the work of "political operatives" who he suspected might be working for Mayor Keller. He said the aerial endongening was "a coordinated effort, very intentional, and these people were trained."
"Those people were planted there," Gonzales said. "They went there. They didn't go over there to have a civil discourse, they were there to disrupt. And they did act out that violence. So to me, it's very intentional." [...]
"It became so distracting from the sound and everything I couldn't really get my point across," Gonzales said. "I was trying to answer one of the lady's questions that was with this group of four that were political operatives for somebody, I believe possibly the other campaign. So for me, I was surprised. And it was distracting."
Not surprisingly, Keller's campaign says nah, not us, don't be a flying dick about this. Keller's campaign manager, Neri Holguin, condemned the incident as "disruptive, rude and immature," adding, "We denounce demeaning antics and urge residents to participate in the political process in a respectful manner."
As for the assertion that the Keller campaign was responsible for the winged wang, Holguin said, "To suggest we were behind it is pathetic and the kind of desperation that has marked Manny's troubled campaign," which may be a reference to the fact that Gonzales is still collecting petition signatures to make it onto the ballot. The deadline is June 19.
Dreyer also denied being an operative for Keller.
"Manny Gonzales is trying to associate me with Tim Keller or radical leftist behavior," Dreyer told the Journal. "I'm not a fan of Tim Keller either and identify as libertarian."
Hmm, maybe, but wouldn't a libertarian have used a flying copy of Atlas Shrugged? Eh, anyone who loves that is already a dick.
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