This is too good not to share. MRC’s Dan Gainor wrote for Foxnews.com on the liberal tendency to describe the Republicans with the term “clown car.”
He found that since January 1, MSNBC hosts and their guests have dragged out the phrase 38 times. Hardball host Chris Matthews by far the worst repeat offender, with 29 mentions since the beginning of the year.
"Well, speaking of the clown car, I think I invented that term and I will hold on to it,” he told the Hardball audience May 11. When he discussed the Republican field with guests, out came the “clown car” calls, like some parrot begging for a cracker. Even the Conservative Political Action Conference became that “clown car convention.”
Matthews was far from alone. Sirius/XM Radio hard-left host John Fugelsang told “The Ed Show” on April 24, that Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana was making a “big public play to be the latest elf to jump in the big overcrowded clown car” that is the GOP.
Left-leaning Susan Milligan, a political and foreign affairs writer for US News & World Report, got into the act in a big Hardball way May 20. “It’s interesting to me that you’ve got all of these Republican men and one woman running. And the only reason they have for running is that they have this double-decker clown car of candidates and think ‘well, why not me, if these guys can run?’” she asked.
Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who authored Idiot America, upgraded the vehicle of choice. “You know, we all saw what the clown car looked like in 2012. And it looks like in 2016, we`re going to have a clown SUV,” he told the audience of the little-watched All In With Chris Hayes February 20.
Newspaper columnists have also enjoyed the phrase:
In March, New York Times opinion columnist Timothy Egan called it “the clown car holding a clutch of potential Republican presidential candidates continues to gasp along.” For Egan, who complained about “the landfill of Republican dimwittedness,” this was par for the course. He even upgraded his phrasing further to a “clown bus,” in a May column.
Washington Post columnists Michael Gerson and Dana Milbank have both deployed the term. Milbank’s May 18, 2015 piece was headlined: “The Republican field is a clown car” and Gerson called it a “stretch clown car.”
