Now that the first Republican debate is over, it’s time to take a look at the overall state of the upcoming election while weeping quietly into soggy pages torn in a fit of anguish from the Book of Revelation.

On the Republican side, those who attended the debate included the Dull Guy, the other Dull Guy, the Fat Guy, the Girl, the Black Guy but he seems nice enough, the Irritating Skinny Guy plus the What’s-His-Name Guy and the Who The Hell Even is That Guy. One or two of the candidates got a bump in the polls after the debate when they distinguished themselves by having certain opinions, but no one can remember which candidates or what opinions and by now the bump is gone so, really, who cares?

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has dropped out of the race, sending shock waves through Miami when people there learned that the city had a mayor, and his name was Francis Suarez and he had been off somewhere running for president instead of getting the locals to speak English and stop killing each other.

This means that, as of today, the 2024 presidential race seems likely to come down to the Democrat, who’s a Dead Guy, and the Republican front-runner, a soon-to-be-convicted Felon. The Felon is slightly ahead in the polls except on those days when the Dead Guy is ahead but many people are convinced that the Felon is the country’s only hope, unless it’s the Dead Guy.

The News Media, of course, heavily favors the Dead Guy and has gone to great lengths to prove to the public that he’s not really dead but only looks dead because he’s so corrupt his soul is full of a moral emptiness that resembles death, sort of like Macbeth when he makes that Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech at the end of the play, except silently because obviously this guy is dead.

In order to prove that the Dead Guy is not really a dead guy, reporters at USA Today were pulled off their usual beat of drawing colorful pie charts for blithering idiots and were assigned instead to study pictures of the Dead Guy for signs of life. To do this, they enlarged the pictures of the Dead Guy until it finally became clear that he was not in fact a corpse but merely a vague haze of pixels designed to obscure the conspiring cabal of leftist authoritarians standing behind him and working day and night to destroy every last American freedom in order to change the climate to one of Depression-era levels of total misery. However, in the event the Dead Guy turns out to actually be dead, his party will need someone else to beat the Felon and will have to choose between the Vice President, who spends most of her time reading colorful USA Today pie charts, and the Obviously Sinister Guy, who would have to run on his record of turning California from a Paradise into something like a Port-o-san only without the amenities.

As for the Felon, he continues to travel the country baiting and insulting federal prosecutors and judges, because he feels that’s the legal strategy that worked so well for John Dillinger. Other than that, the Felon continues to run on his record, though not on his criminal record, but on the record where he kept employment high, prices low, cut regulations and taxes, wiped out Isis, brought peace to the Middle East and didn’t start any new wars — although apparently some people think that IS his criminal record, but they’re already voting for the Dead Guy.

So it seems the American people have a tough decision before them: whether to repeatedly hit themselves in the face with a brick until everything seems fine, or to dress up as a woman and catch a plane to Amsterdam in time to become only the second Miss Netherlands to have a penis, unless you hang out in the Red Light district where that’s actually pretty common. You might also try escaping to Hungary where low immigration and Christianity-based governance has turned the place into a crime-free wonderland, or to Uganda, where they put homosexual pedophiles to death, making it virtually impossible to form a teachers union.

* * *

Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. He is an award-winning novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, and popular satirist. Klavan is the author of “When Christmas Comes” and “Strange Habit of Mind,” the first two novels in the USA Today best-selling Cameron Winter Mystery series. The third installment, “The House of Love and Death,” releases on October 31, 2023, and is now available for Pre-order.

Follow Klavan on Twitter: @andrewklavan

This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “The Andrew Klavan Show.”

The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

The NYPD plans to use drones to monitor Labor Day parties this weekend.

The unmanned drones will be dispatched in response to complaints about large gatherings like barbecues, including private events, officials said Thursday.

“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party,” Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner, said at a press conference.

The drones were announced during a security briefing about an annual Caribbean festival in Brooklyn called J’ouvert that attracts thousands of people. The drones will be deployed for “non-priority and priority calls” off the parade route, Daughtry said.

The announcement sparked immediate criticism from privacy advocates who argued the police drone use is illegal.

“It’s a troubling announcement,” Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the Associated Press.

“Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario,” he said.

Schwarz argued the NYPD’s plan “flies in the face” of the POST Act, a 2020 city law that requires the police force to be transparent about its surveillance methods.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP

“One of the biggest concerns with the rush to roll out new forms of aerial surveillance is how few protections we have against seeing these cameras aimed at our backyards or even our bedrooms,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP).

“Clearly, flying a drone over a backyard barbecue is a step too far for many New Yorkers,” Cahn said.

The NYPD’s use of drones has skyrocketed to 124 occasions so far this year, up from only four times using drones in all of last year, according to city data.

Mayor Eric Adams, who previously said the police drones have “endless” potential, dismissed concerns about the drones, promising no one would be “monitored.”

“We have to push back on the sci-fi aspects of drones — nobody’s going to be monitored,” Adams said Friday at a press conference alongside NYPD Commissioner Eddie Caban.

“So what we’re doing over this weekend, there are a number of calls of loud music, disruptive behavior,” Adams said. “Instead of the police having to respond and look at those, they’re going to utilize drones from a safe distance up, not down flying in someone’s backyard to see what they have on a grill.”

Adams said the NYPD will use the drones to determine whether they need to send crisis management teams immediately to address the problem. He argued that drones can arrive at a problem area much faster than cops trying to navigate crowded streets.

The NYPD commissioner agreed with the mayor and said drones have been “a wonderful thing” for the police force.

“Everybody, like the mayor said, is worried about sci-fi,” the commissioner said.

The city recently deployed the police drones at two Manhattan events that got out of hand — a fight at Washington Square Park after the Pride parade, and during streamer Kai Cenat’s gamer giveaway in Union Square that erupted into violence.