Watching the wheels come off a clown car has its charms, teetering as it does on that tightrope between hilarious and terrifying. It's hilarious because, c'mon, it's a bunch of clowns and you're watching those painted dopes as they get flung around like a dog toy in the teeth of a particularly enthusiastic pit bull, screaming, clawing at each other as they to try to position themselves to not fling out of the car as it flips over and over, wondering why the hell so many of them shoved their way into the vehicle in the first place. Of course, screaming clowns are terrifying in and of themselves, but you kind of feel like they deserve it. Fucking clowns.
Obviously, it's a completely different story once the clown car comes to a halt, the road coated with a viscous sheen of clown guts and greasepaint and motor oil, stray disembodied feet in giant shoes and red noses, real and rubber, scattered about, and arteries spurting briefly like a gag flower on wide lapel. So many dead and disemboweled clowns. Someone's gotta clean up that mess. I mean, you can't just leave it there. It'll block the road, maybe cause more accidents, freak out the kids. For every pie flung in someone's face, there's someone else whose job is to mop up the pie that hit the floor. For every clown car disaster, someone else has to break out the shovels and scrapers and hoses and get that gore gone.
Sure, it's kind of amazing to watch as the Republican Party is in the midst of its inevitable crash. We're in the slow-motion wreck part of the arc of this story. It's the kind of self-immolation that you usually see in overly-literal protesters. It's quite a sight. You've got former President and current record-holder for most-indicted president Donald Trump, sitting lumpily at his trial for financial fraud, muttering and making noises like a gassy Charles Manson, as the judge repeatedly has to teach him how to act like a human being. You've got House Republicans now scrambling to see which of the various fucknuts, rape-enablers, or Trump penis koozies they are going to elect to wreck the nation by refusing to act on anything that isn't certifiably insane or blatantly destructive or both. And they might go to political war with each other, which would be a shit fight in a crashing clown car. You've got a passel of pathetic also-rans, bumbling around the country in a desperate attempt to get some traction for campaigns that were over the moment they announced, pinning their dreams on the imprisonment of the indicted original shit-lump, who lumbers wheezily to rally after rally to spout madness to a deliriously, gleefully violent cult of racist zombies, and yet, for some reason, the other non-Christie candidates can't bring themselves to say anything truly negative about Trump. None of this even scratches the surface of all the wanton fuckery Republicans are doing to themselves in their Trump-contorted reality.
Yeah, it's amusing as fuck to watch it happen. It'd be a fuck of a lot more fun if it wasn't a goddamned threat to all of us not inside the information vacuum MAGA freaks exist in. It's impossible to ignore growing violence and threats of violence from that aforementioned cult, and a leading candidate for president encouraging them to be ready to enjoy nonstop vengeance against their perceived enemies if he gets back into office and maybe to be ready to commit that violence if he doesn't. Meanwhile, the allegedly normal news media seems to give more of a shit about who Joe Biden's fucking dog bit than that the former president keeps saying shoplifters should be executed without trial.
As I said, the problem with the bloody detritus left behind after the clown car is done being wrecked is that you need to get it out of the way and get the road open again. And that's gonna fall to Democrats because we're the goddamn cleaning crew. With an assist from congressional Democrats, Clinton cleaned up after Reagan/Bush, Obama cleaned up after Bush, Jr, and Biden cleaned up after Trump. The difference now is that Trump and the Trumpians all crawled out of one wrecked clown car and immediately got into another one and now are making a mess again on the road that Democrats just fucking cleared. (Okay, I might need to let this metaphor go.)
Lemme put this simply: The Republican Party is no longer a legitimate national party. It is beholden to one man without whom most of the people who have supported the party the last few years would go back to crouching in their dirt holes, masturbating to murder porn and sending out anti-Semitic memes. I mean, they still do that now, but they also vote because of Trump. No Trump and no reason to vote. And smart Republicans know this, so that leaves them with a choice: stay on that imploding Trump train until the bitter end and hope you'll survive or jump off and have some goddamn dignity without being re-elected.
Or maybe there's another possibility, especially for the 18 Republicans in districts that Biden won: join the clean-up crew. Go independent and caucus with Democrats or just outright switch parties. It just take a few to switch control of the House of Representatives. Say you did it because you want to get shit done and you're tired of working with people who ought to be institutionalized. You're sick of Marjorie Taylor Greene's protein drink farts and Jim Jordan's flop sweat smell on his polyester shirts. Who could blame you? Otherwise we're stuck with the screaming clowns until at least January 2025.
