TomFlannery.com

Really people. Calling it the “republican clown car” is seriously offensive to clowns. So stop it. I’ve known guys who were clowns. Not the creepy Gacey-type clowns…just regular kids birthday party clowns trying to make a few extra bucks on the weekends, with smiles and balloons and rubber noses and the big red feet. Charming really. This assault on their good name should not stand. We’re better than this, dammit!

Last night, as the new leader of the Republican party bragged about the size of his dick during yet another Presidential debate (add the actual CNN headline “Donald Trump defends the size of his penis” to the NeverThoughtIdSeeThat category) , I was playing a gig in Dickson City….warily watching the unsmiling man across the bar with the camouflage “Trump” cap as I sang “meet the new boss….he’s the same as the old boss…”. After all, it was an open mic night and the room was filled with hippie liberal commie guitar players. Like me. Mostly Bernie supporters who dream big about equality and not being led by a fascist….. quaint shit like that. I half expected the guy to start building a wall around the stage using Mexican money. It was a bit unnerving but he seemed nice enough and seemed to enjoy the music…which is all that matters. Music is never divisive. Music brings people together…which makes the fact that it’s the first thing schools cut when they wanna save pennies all the more perplexing. Personally I think a world with more guitars and less bombs would be a better place, and not just because guitars are cheaper (unless you ordered a custom Martin from the factory). But so be it. We shared a room and escaped to sing another day…..and remain freakishly liberal….and that’s the important part.

Apparently Marco Rubio…..that one who looks like a high school sophomore…. the one who reminds me of that kid who sits under the hoop at basketballs games and runs out and wipe the floor with a towel during timeouts, made a nudge- nudge wink-wink comment about the size of Trump’s hands. Or something. It’s hard to keep up with this stuff. Trump insists on calling him “Little Marco”…..which is driving the Rube crazy. So….you know….what would you do?

Reference the size of Trump’s willy, obviously. This is America boys and girls. Brave men and women have fought and died so that Republican challengers for the President of the United States can say “mine’s bigger than yours.”

It’s down to four now. Ted Cruz and John Kasich are the other two, for those counting at home. Cruz is so batshit crazy he makes Mel Gibson’s dad look like Dennis Kucinich. He can only be from Texas. With that “please punch me in the face” face and his creepy wife who thinks he’s Jesus reincarnated sent from the sky to make us all rapture-ready. His own daughter won’t even pretend to like him on the campaign trail. Hands down he’s the most hated man in the senate, which is really saying something when you think about it. His colleagues joke about killing him on the senate floor and getting away with it because nobody would dare convict them. Clearly this man is a bridge builder eh? Even fellow Texan Rick Perry….who is well acquainted with crazy….thinks Cruz needs to be medicated.

We all know guys like Ted Cruz in our lives. We call them “assholes” and “dicks”.

Kasich is the only person on the stage who acts like an adult during debates. That is…he doesn’t make penis jokes and he doesn’t shout over the others and doesn’t blame tough questions on the menstrual cycle of female debate moderators. Of course this makes him boring as fuck in the year of our Lord 2016 so he’s in dead last place. He’s the “moderate” of the bunch….a man who admits the climate change is real and doesn’t want to deport all the brown people. He also considers women little more than walking wombs….and his draconian anti-abortion stance sounds like something cooked up in between Salem witch trials. But whatever….in today’s Republican party Dick Nixon and Ronald Reagan look like Che Guevara in comparison, so Kasich is treated as a minor annoyance and nothing more.

And so that’s that. It has come to this. We’re out of ideas. America has turned into Shutter Island. Break out the psychoactive drugs and line up to enter the lighthouse. Your lobotomy awaits.

In a bit…

–tf