The 2022 Ass Clown of the Year

Well, Friends, it's been quite a year for ass clownery, hasn't it? Over the course of the year we have presented 27 Right Cheek, Left-Cheek, On-Crack, and Special Awards, and could have easily presented twice that number and not run short of dishonorees. Since I opened voting for the Annual Award on December 19th, I have received a gratifyingly large number of responses. Without further ado, let's count down the top five nominees en route to the Ass Clown of the Year:

In fifth place, with 495 votes, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who holds the record for most Ass Clown of the Year victories with his back-to-back wins in 2018, 2019, and 2020. He was a latecoming entry to this year's contest, which is a good indicator of the intensity of the competition.

In fourth place, with 691 votes, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. A man as dangerously cruel and authoritarian as Der Furor, but with better packaging. Not to mention his own election police to ensure he wins.

In third place, with 990 votes, billionaire lunatic Elon Musk. If you're a Twitter user, you've seen the sort of damage his erratic and ill-considered management style can do to an enterprise, and his complicated waltz with "freedom of speech" can do to a nation that loves "freedom" in the abstract, if not in the dirty reality of the responsibilities that come with it. The old, apocryphal quote* applies: "If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gave it to."

The Runner-Up, in second place with 1050 votes, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan. Few people are as good at making huge amounts of furiously angry and self-righteous noise while actually generating no significant legislative activity on behalf of his constituents and the nation. He will probably take the chair of the House Judiciary Committee in the new year, which is a virtual guarantee that the committee will accomplish nothing useful, obscuring a thin and partisan record with thunderous rants, cherry-picked "evidence," gaslighting, and whataboutism.

And the runaway winner, with 1955 votes,

The 2022 Ass Clown of the Year

is

Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Governor Abbott "distinguished" himself in the performance of supremely hypocritical and inhumane behavior during the past year as he used the surging illegal immigration crisis at his state's border with Mexico as a partisan political issue rather than an opportunity to help spark meaningful updates to the nation's grossly outdated immigration policy.

Mr Abbott's most awful stunt, for which he received the December On-Crack Ass Clown Award a mere three days ago, was the shipping of three busloads of immigrants, many of them in light clothing, to Washington and dumping them on Christmas Eve in bitter cold weather on the street in front of the Vice Presidential home at the Washington Naval Observatory. This, however, was only the latest stunt in a long series of shamelessly inhumane actions which included the use - at his state's request - of Border Patrol agents on horseback to forcibly disperse migrants and those who sought to help them.

While no one can argue that the huge tide of desperate would-be immigrants arriving from Latin America at the nation's southern border represents a humanitarian crisis of historic proportions, Governor Abbott has chosen to address the problem by simply shipping busloads of ill-clothed and -fed immigrants to northern cities with no prior coordination that would allow the immigrants to be appropriately fed and housed. The current crisis provides a perfect backdrop for meaningful reform of the nation's immigration policies, but both of our political parties - especially the Republicans - have chosen to use it instead as a viciously partisan political sword with as much poison in the handle as in the blade.

This year, for the first time we are presenting to the winner, in the form of an utterly worthless non-fungible token,  

The Official Tinfoil and Toilet Paper Crown

to be worn as a symbol of well-deserved shame and derision.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Readers, by popular vote, the 2022 Ass Clown of the Year is Texas Governor Greg Abbott. He leaves a towering achievement in cruel and heartless ass clownery that will be difficult to beat ... but hordes of challengers are ready to try.

And just in case you're interested, eleven different candidates received votes this time. The six also-rans were:

Kevin McCarthy (425 votes);

Mark Meadows (395 votes);

Donald Trump, Jr (325 votes);

Elise Stefanik (115 votes);

George Santos (110 votes); and

Der Furor (1 vote, which I cast myself because I couldn't stand to see him not be recognized for his world-class ass clownery). 

Happy New Year to you and your families and friends. I hope, although not without trepidation, that the new year will be better than the old.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* It has been attributed at various times to Dorothy Parker, Alexander Pope, Thomas Guthrie, and many others. Nobody knows who actually said it first, but that doesn't make it any less accurate.