The Ass Clown of the Week Award Returns!

It's been a while since I have bestowed the prestigious Ass Clown of the Week Award on a deserving recipient. This is because there have been so many worthy potential honorees that I was completely unable to make a decision. But our troubled times call for action, and so in order to facilitate the selection, I have decided to adjust the criteria for the Award to allow for two things: a group, rather than an individual award; and the award of a tie.

And so, Dear Readers, the coveted Ass Clown of the Week Award -

is presented jointly to the Republican and Democratic parties -

Matt Miller, writing earlier this week in The Washington Post, provided the citation for this award in his wonderful article The Third-Party Stump Speech We Need:

"Neither of our two major parties has a strategy for solving our biggest problems; they have strategies for winning elections, which isn’t the same thing. Democrats and Republicans will tell you, as I do, that they want to make America competitive again, keep faith with our deepest values of fairness and opportunity, and fix our broken political system. But the Democrats’ timid half-measures and the Republicans’ mindless anti-government creed can’t begin to get us there. Both parties are prisoner to interest groups and ideological litmus tests that prevent them from blending the best of liberal and conservative thinking. And neither party trusts you enough to lay out the facts and explain the steps we need to take to truly fix things ..."

I think this award is richly deserved, and I encourage you to read Mr Miller's whole article that I linked above. His ideas (with the exception of the one to lower the voting age to 15, which I think is silly) are the sort of ideas we'd be hearing from a responsible Congress ... if we had one that was more interested in serving the nation than scoring cheap political points.

The Ass Clown of the Week Award is presented to the Republican and Democratic parties - and seldom has it been more richly earned.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - a little historical note - today, September 28th, is the anniversary of the birthday (in 1836) of the unfortunately-named Thomas Crapper. Mr Crapper was a noted English plumber who, contrary to popular belief, did not invent the flush toilet, although he did develop and patent nine other innovative plumbing mechanisms, including the floating ball cock (just step away from that joke, and no one will get hurt). Just thought you'd like to know.

B.