Say it ain’t so, Joe

In a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III will be the Republican party’s nominee to run for president in 2024.

“No one has done more this year than my pal Joe to advance the GOP’s agenda,” McCarthy, R-Weasel, told the Republican Committee to Advance Despotism.

“So far it’s been baby steps but I think he has it in him to reduce the influence of the Democrat Party next year, when we take back Congress, and make it little more than an afterthought in ’24 when we take back the White House,” McCarthy said.

He said the idea to go outside his own party for a presidential candidate occurred to him after Manchin, D-Monkeywrench, once again sided with the GOP by blocking any meaningful reform of the Senate’s filibuster rules, agreeing only to the smallest, least effective changes.

Manchin, speaking through an interpreter, said that “democracy must be protected at all costs. Granted, I can’t think of one Republican who is willing to take part in protecting it.”

“Still, I believe bipartisanship is the only way to preserve it,” Manchin added, “and if that means me running as a Republican for the presidency and keeping a certain apricot-hued butterball off the ticket, I’m all for it.”

Trump said McCarthy’s decision “will lead to the death of the GOP. What is wrong with him? Doesn’t he know I’ve got the nomination in the bag? Doesn’t he know Slow Joe Biden hasn’t got a chance in hell of even running for a second term? Kevin better change his mind and fix this or the only speaker he’s going to be is speaking into a megaphone in front of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow.”

McCarthy’s announcement stunned Reps. Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, all of whom said they had been assured by him that they would be the Republican party’s 2024 presidential nominee.

“Kevin told me he could think of no more qualmy candidate to compete for … excuse me, I mean more qualified candidate to compete for the leadership of our nation,” Gosar, R-Cavity, said. “He said so right after my address to the America First Political Action Committee fundraiser,” whose leader has been labeled a white supremacist by the Justice Department.

Boebert, R-Rumormonger, said she was “appalled that McCarthy has withdrawn his support for me as the next president of the United States just because of allegations that I slept with Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb and Thaar Ghaleb al-Harbi.”

Greene, R-Rabid, has claimed that cancer is as transmissible as COVID. “Okay, my thing about Jewish space lasers, that was a mistake,” she said during a speech to a neo-fascist group, “but the cancer thing is real. Tucker Carlson told me that when I was talking to him about how to get (Kyle) Rittenhouse the Congressional Gold Medal.”

The decision to speak to the Ayran Republican Army, Greene insisted, was “an understandable mistake” occurring after one of her staff members told her Kevin McCarthy was one of the group’s members, apparently mistaking bank robber Kevin “Blondie” McCarthy for the current minority house leader.