This year provided another bountiful harvest for which to give thanks, a national treasure of engorged ego and demented thought and perverse lunacy taking itself seriously…for an observer of the cultural and the political such as myself a steady presence of delusional pedigrees with its glorious abundance of opportunity for comic evisceration is the essence of happiness always.

Among the earliest and richest bounties for which to be thankful this year were the Republican Party presidential primaries, which, had the candidates not provided a heady flow of imbecilic utterance and flamboyant mental imbalance still would have merited praise for ample hilarity, simply for their candidates’ public affirmation of conviction that they actually could be elected president.

Not least among the perennial blessings are the nation’s befuddled plutocrats, those champions of the meritocratic who by and large inherited their dough, the likes of deluded nitwits Trump, Romney and the Brothers Koch falling somewhere between Caligula and the British Royal Family. The one-percent’s insistence we name them Job Creators and situate them on Olympus has been guaranteed to keep the rest of us doubled over in stitches, the “makers” finagling the tax code and paying the “takers” diddly in order to bloat their bank accounts and their self –esteem, their self-regard always a laughing matter for us.

There is Feudalist-in-Chief Grover Norquist more comically forlorn as his relevance waned, the nation’s foremost and antiquated stigmatizer of revenue losing previously cowed politicians and pledge-signing true believers at approximately the pace that beleaguered and demoralized Russian soldiers peeled away from the battlefields of the First World War. Still alone in the woods well past dark hunting the elusive snipe, Mr. Norquist dreams of a restoration of 18^th century government now in the 21^st, though the population beckons not for a ridiculous lessening of government but only for less of Grover himself.

What a wonderful world it could never be without crazy old cranky John McCain railing against the Obama administration and spitting out sour grapes like a Gatling gun. The Laurel to Lindsay Graham’s Hardy the two of them are now our most reliably uproarious duo of comedic petulance on the national stage. And then there’s Paul Ryan, Mr. Universe of intellectualism, the Tea Party, the contingent in the country that talks the most about the Constitution and knows the least, and the liberty-spouting Libertarians oxymoronically advocating slavery to the business class and the corporate hegemons, all of them legends in their own minds, blessedly provided for the sating of our gluttonous craving to guffaw at the expense of others.

Not to be forgotten and high on the list among those owed a certifiable debt of gratitude for all they have given of themselves as fodder for ridicule are those rarefied and prideful residents of the city of Los Angeles, the city in which I live, certain cogs in the machinery of popular entertainment. Rarely in the history of mankind has so much embodiment of the mediocre and flaccid deployment of the formulaic generated so many gravy boats of easy loot, and worse, much worse, deluded sense of self-importance. For allowing me to partake so amply from this bounty of buffoonery I give my, um, humble thanks.