The Left-Cheek Ass Clown for October, 2024

We are just over two weeks away from the 2024 General election, in which Americans will elect a new President, all 435 members of the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and a raft of state and local officers. 

It's a fraught time in our nation's history, and the choice between parties and candidates has seldom been more clear. Polls - to the extent that the accuracy of polls can be trusted - indicate that Vice President Harris and Der Furor are in a statistical tie, and both parties are spending obscene amounts of money to sway the relative handful of voters who remain "undecided."

The vast number of candidates clamoring for attention has made it difficult over the past year to select appropriate winners for my twice-a-month* Ass Clown Awards, but this time - as the election looms - the choice seems obvious ... at least to me.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Readers, with a roll of drums and a flatulent blare of trumpets, we present the award for

The Left-Cheek Ass Clown for October, 2024

to

The Republican Party

The Republican Party, by itself or as a co-awardee, has won this award a towering 17 times previously, including three Ass Clown of the Year awards**.  I can't do a better job of summing up today's deluded, increasingly fascist GOP than did conservative writers Thomas E. Mann and Norm Ornstein, writing in their 2012 (fourteen years ago!) opinion article titled "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem" ...

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

I continue to be utterly amazed that so many of my fellow Americans can ignore the relentless outpouring of distortions, outright lies, and vicious threats from a party to which I once belonged. I continue to be utterly amazed that so many of my fellow Americans can ignore the obvious unfitness of Der Furor for any position of public responsibility, much less the Presidency: his incoherent word salad "speeches"***, reluctance to sit for unscripted interviews by actual journalists^†, and increasingly violent rhetoric.

No Republican figure currently in office or anxious to be elected to one is willing to admit that their emperor has no political, economic, or policy clothes. They either ignore questions completely or avoid commenting on the most bizarre examples of Der Furor's behavior and rhetoric ("I haven't heard that so I can't comment" is a common dodge). They refuse to acknowledge that Der Furor lost the 2020 election, in spite of overwhelming evidence that this is true. They ignore or wink at Der Furor's most outrageous, fascistic comments about rounding up and deporting migrants (whether legal or illegal is often unclear), turning the National Guard and the Armed Forces against American citizens, trying his political opponents for treason, endorsing violence by police, etc. They are craven, spineless wretches in the service of a man unworthy of their debasement.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Readers, as we enter the home stretch of the 2024 elections, I present October's Left-Cheek Ass Clown Award to the Republican Party - a once-proud party that has tied itself to a charlatan living in an alternate reality.

Have a good day and make sure you vote on November 5th if you haven't already (as I have).

More thoughts tomorrow, when we visit the kings and queens of wrap ... mummies ... for Cartoon Saturday. See you then.

Bilbo

* I could have said "bimonthly," but because that can mean either "twice a month" or "every two months," I'll just go with the unambiguous "twice a month."

** The list: September, 2011; 2011 Ass Clown of the Year (ACOY); October, 2013; 2017 ACOY; October, 2018 Left-Cheek; April, 2020 Right-Cheek; September, 2020 Special Award; May, 2021 Right-Cheek; October, 2021 Right-Cheek; November, 2021 Left-Cheek; February, 2022 Left-Cheek; March, 2022 Right-Cheek; August, 2022 Right-Cheek; October, 2022 Right-Cheek; August, 2023 Right-Cheek; September, 2023 Left-Cheek; and 2023 ACOY.

*** He calls it "the weave," as if the name gives a rhetorical veneer to incoherent juxtapositions of words generally unrelated to the questions that were asked or the topic to be addressed.

†Say what you will about Vice-President Harris, she sat for a less-than-friendly interview on Fox News ... while the network provided a softball "town hall" for Der Furor with an audience of hand-selected Republican women supporters.