Exit Stage Right Cartoon
Exit Stage Right Even
Exit Stage Right Ac Brotherhood
Exit Stage Right Snaggle Puss

Instead of turning right (west), turn left (south), keeping to the wall ledges to avoid a few guards as you make your way toward the target gunmen. There are four gunmen you need to kill before. Before dashing offscreen to make an escape or run an errand, Snagglepuss announces the move in the form of a theatrical stage direction, saying 'Exit, stage left!' (or 'right,' as the case may be, or 'up' or 'down' even). Finally, Snagglepuss tends to add the word 'even' for emphasis at the ends of sentences.

A Punch and Judy show is a shock-comedy act in which a couple of gaudy, clownish puppets do violence on each other — and on several supporting characters — with gleeful audience participation and engagement.

The Trump and Rudy Show is similar: It’s also a shocking, tragi-comic spectacle with two main characters so over-the-top they might as well be puppets beating up on a litany of familiar players, while inciting their followers to do the same.

The victims of their bludgeoning include institutions like the election system, the courts, the legal process, political tradition, and the Constitution. But most notably among them is the Republican Party…

They’re getting bruised and bloodied worst of all in this clown-show. In my opinion, Trump’s juvenile antics, pouting absenteeism, and defiant messaging are battering the GOP’s image so badly they ought to sue for spousal abuse!

Meanwhile, wild-eyed Giuliani’s sweaty press-conference meltdowns, disjointed rhetoric, admitted exaggerations, and so-far unproven accusations of widespread national election fraud are making fellow septuagenarian Joe Biden look lucid, cogent, honest, credible, and downright presidential by contrast.

Now ordinarily, I would just sit back and enjoy the absurd political theatre in all this. That’s what I did during the Trump impeachment farce, the Democrat meltdown after the 2016 election, the 2000 “hanging chad” election drama, and the Clinton impeachment (also a farce)…

But in none of those elections or other proceedings was America’s liberty — and the integrity of the system that’s supposed to ensure it — hanging so precariously in the balance. The same cannot be said of this current fiasco.

Everything is at stake here — and if Trump and Rudy aren’t careful, they’re going to throw it all away

I’m going to catch all sorts of hell for this piece, I realize. But I don’t care…

Because my top concern isn’t whether one particular person or another sits in the White House. What I care about most is the survival of that “American ethos” I outlined in my last Whiskey & Gunpowder article, on Thanksgiving Day.

To recap, I described this ethos as, “The right and freedom to govern ourselves and make our own fortunes — coupled with the will to do both of these things better every day, or die trying.”

For me, the Republican Party seems to embody and enable this American Way more than the Democratic Party. That’s why I want them to survive and gain in power.

Now don’t get me wrong — I’ve got massive gripes with the GOP. And at times in the past, I’ve accused them of being just as big-government as the Democrats, only with different agendas and priorities. But clearly, if you like freedom, money, and the ability to make your own way in this life with less interference from the state…

The Republicans are the lesser of evils nowadays, and the closest thing to the libertarian ideals that should be governing this nation, but never will, it seems.

Now let me bring this back to Trump, Rudy, and the 2020 election.

For at least 30 years now (maybe longer — I’m working from memory here), the right-of-center punditry and elected leadership have argued that each successive presidential contest has been a battle for the political soul of this country…

A mortal struggle between traditional American ideals of self-government and self-determination and a rising tide of liberalism, progressivism, Marxism, collectivism, globalism, socialism, totalitarianism, or any other Far Left “ism” you can name.

Looking back on it now, however, I think this “war for the nation’s soul” argument wasn’t truly accurate until the 2020 election cycle.

Sure, by some measures, presidents Clinton and Obama steered America farther left than it was before they took office. And it’s no doubt true that a divided government for much of their respective tenures prevented them from making the country even more liberal, by degrees.

But I think it’s abundantly clear now that the primary objective of the Democratic Party’s new guards, and some of its old guards, too (like Schumer, on record)…

Is to fundamentally change America into something much closer to a quasi-socialist, globally-focused welfare state — rather than the self-sustaining bastion of liberty, capitalism, independence, and detached neutrality it’s supposed to be.

In other words: Now that our national election actually is a “war for the nation’s soul,” this overused catchphrase has lost much of its punch. It’s now the partisan mantra that cried wolf, ironically.

But I digress. As I outlined in my Nov. 12 article…

The “Alamo” of this political war will be the Jan. 5 Senate run-offs in Georgia — if the Democrats sweep those, it could be the beginning of the end for the American Way

I’m not saying there wasn’t vote fraud in the 2020 presidential election — perhaps even on a massive enough scale to sway the result. It’s entirely possible, without a doubt. I wouldn’t put it past the Democrats to do it, either…

And to be clear: The election system and process is something I think we should definitely look at reforming, as a nation. It would be a great platform for a Republican candidate (perhaps Trump?) to run on in the future.

But there are two things I’d enter into evidence, so to speak, on this point…

One, there are always shenanigans going on in America’s elections, at all levels, to some degree. Our history is littered with them, especially on the Democrat side of things (look it up). Elections have been stolen in this country before, for sure.

And two, as far as the chaotic 2020 election goes, Rudy and the other lawyers on Trump’s team know full well that at this point, the only thing that matters is what large-scale malfeasance they can prove in court.

The twist is that unless there’s some hidden, multi-state, multi-million-vote fraud rabbit they’re waiting to pull out of the hat…

The optics of this whole situation are putting Georgia’s Senate seats, the Republican Party’s future, and perhaps even the American Way itself in jeopardy.

That’s because to any objective observer, it now looks like Trump — and the GOP, by extension — are the ones who are actually trying to steal the 2020 election.

It looks that way because of The Trump and Rudy Show’s claims of widespread voter fraud, but with virtually no hard proof yet revealed.

It looks that way because of the sitting president’s near-total stonewalling of the president elect’s transition to power, in open defiance of tradition…

And repeatedly implying that he might not leave the White House, even if he loses.

It looks that way because of Trump’s increasingly outlandish (and difficult to prove) conspiracy theories…

Like suggesting this past Sunday that his own FBI and DOJ might’ve been involved in rigging the election against him.

Perhaps most of all, though, it looks that way because of Rudy’s strategy of plowing through the legal process as fast as possible, evidence be damned, so he can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court…

Which more than half the people in America no doubt believe the GOP gamed the system to stack — in anticipation of just such an election challenge!

That really doesn’t look good.

Exit Stage Right Cartoon

There’s more I could lay out for you, too. But again, my point is that appearances trump facts. That sucks, and it’s not fair, but it’s the way it is.

Exit Stage Right Even

And even though the president has every legal right to challenge these election results, the way he’s going about it risks making the American people nostalgic for the relative class, dignity, honesty, and restraint of Richard Nixon.

Exit Stage Right Ac Brotherhood

Personally, I think it all looks SO bad that even if Trump’s legal team could somehow prove that he legiti

Exit, Stage Right...