The Mango Megalomaniac delivered the knockout punch his supporters were so hoping for in last night’s debate but unfortunately for them his hay-maker missed Hated Hillary and landed squarely on his own jaw.

The man who finds ever more creative ways to lower the election bar finally reached his bottom Wednesday night in twice refusing to say he would accept the verdict of the people on Nov. 8.

How low did he go to inflame his base by questioning the legitimacy of his country’s sacrosanct electoral process? He went lower than the snake’s anus he has proved himself to be.

Earlier this year, after travelling the Divided States for five months, this casual election observer channeled Charles Dickens in suggesting the U.S. is the best of countries and the worst of countries.

The world is seeing the worst of it now.

The dirty dogfight billed as a presidential election is putting a dark stain on the democratic tradition Americans purport to hold so dear. It is not so much an election by the people for the people as it is a no-holds-barred cage fight between the much-reviled choice of the Democratic Party elite and a narcissistic, sociopath who tapped into widespread voter discontent and the nation’s dark psyche to steal the nomination from the Republican Party elite.

Is it democracy when the people are presented with two choices out of a population of 300-plus million, both of whom are deeply disliked and mistrusted by the majority?

But there you have it. On Election Day the people must choose between a foul-mouthed, bronze-tinted, accused sexual deviant and a trust-challenged, political schemer who has her own sex pervert, if not on the ticket, then at her side on the dais and stumping for her on the campaign trail.

How did it come to this in a country that bills itself as the world’s showcase of democracy? A nation awash in good-intentioned people with intellectual depth. A land whose institutions of higher learning are beacons for deep thinkers from around the globe.

To go over the months of mudslinging from both primaries to the final weeks of the campaign is too daunting. Let’s start at the pre-Third Debate low point with the accusations of sexual assault, which might seem an odd campaign issue to observers in other countries watching an election being fought by two senior citizens.

The heavily made-up, immaculately-coiffed Czech mate’s vested marital interest aside, few objective observers believe a diverse group of women now numbering in double digits would subject themselves to the abuse of the Mango Misogynist’s knuckle draggers on behalf of Hated Hillary and the Democratic Party. That leaves morally challenged Republicans and fundamentalist religious fanatics to point the finger at Bill Clinton, invoking school yard rationalizations like, “He did it too.”

Democrats deflect accusations against former President Clinton, the Fastest Zipper in the West Wing, by pointing out that he’s not running for election. Indeed he isn’t but with the issue of sexual assault front and centre, the country’s first female Presidential candidate chooses to send the gaunt pee-pee exposer on the campaign trail as her surrogate. At the very least, the optics are terrible and her judgement should rightly be questioned.

Is it any wonder sexual assault on the nation’s college campuses is being called an epidemic, with one in five female students claiming they have suffered some form of sexual abuse? Clearly, being a sexual predator doesn’t preclude one from reaching for the top in America’s democracy.

Despite her deep-seated unpopularity with a vast swath of voters, the Democratic Party power structure handed the 2016 keys to Hated Hillary as reward for being the good soldier when Barack Obama came out of nowhere in 2008 to take the nomination from her on a platform of change.

Remember the optimism embodied in Obama’s campaign slogan–Yes We Can. It seems so long ago.

In defeat, Hated Hillary played nice and toed the party line, helping to elect Obama, then serving as Secretary of State for four years before resigning to raise money and plot her return. The latest manifestation of her long obsession to become Mrs. President began in 2012, funded by big money and Wall Street bankers anxious to hedge their bets.

And who can blame her for vacating her important cabinet post with the Middle East in flames. It takes a lot of money to become the people’s President or even for a seat in the Senate or Congress. So much money that Senators and Congressman spend a great deal of time dialing for dollars when they could be attending to the people’s business or bringing their respective legislative bodies to a standstill with pig-headed devotion to their respective parties. These muddling ideological money grubbers aren’t calling Joe the Plumber for a hundred bucks but instead are concentrating on the big fish, none of whom made their money by giving it away without expecting something in return.

Meanwhile, The Evil Orange Clown, on the lookout for attention with his reality TV career winding down, stumbled upon a power base on the dark side by fronting a fringe conspiracy movement, calling into question the first black President’s right to hold office by questioning his place of birth. Sensing an opening with the country’s legions of mouth-breathers, he declared his bid for the Presidency by following in the footsteps of history’s most successful dictators, demonizing visible minorities by blaming them for the mouth-breathers’ many failures in life.

He insulted his way through the Republican primaries with a clownish swagger that the GOP elite treated like a bad joke until he began knocking off establishment candidates and belittling party stalwarts. Using money he saved from not paying taxes, he travelled the country spewing bigotry and hate while casting his opponents into the political dung heap.

After eight years of ideological obfuscation in the Senate and Congress, during which Republican legislators shut down the federal government, refusing to appropriate funds to the Obama administration for the coming fiscal year, and with the country’s infrastructure deteriorating to Third World levels and the economy sputtering, it became plain for all to see Washington is no longer working for the people.

Enter the Evil Orange Clown stage right wing, fresh off the set of the Apprentice, where his constituency of reality TV viewers deemed him an omnipotent boardroom fixer of all things broken. People desperate for change came out in droves to support a man who hasn’t changed his hairstyle in 50-odd years, except to add a few layers of orange lacquer to his comb over.

Things didn’t turn sinister until Ferret-top’s numbers dropped in the wake of the First Debate and his subsequent late night twitter war with a former beauty queen. By the Second Debate he had been outed by his own foul words as Billy Bush’s pussy-grabbing mentor.

Seriously folks, the GOP’s bad joke had turned into its worst nightmare, threatening to drag the party that gave us George W., Sarah Palin and the Tea Party into the political obscurity it so richly deserves. Republicans hoping to save themselves from drowning in the backwash jumped the sinking ship of deplorable fools like rats running from a ferocious shipboard tomcat, leaving Ferret-top unshackled at the helm.

Instead of dropping anchor to pick up any survivors Captain Clown Face is steering toward the reef, where he will jump into his billionaire lifeboat and do what he has always done in time of crisis, namely leave the little guys whose good faith he took advantage of to their fate.

In light of his whingeing about media bias and a rigged election, followed by his unprecedented disgraceful debate performance that questioned the validity of America’s venerated democratic process, it should be clear to all but the most obtuse fanatics and the un-Christian Right, that Ferret-top is willing to take the country down to save his fake-tanned face.

Hated Hillary may be the flawed candidate of the establishment but beside the Evil Orange Clown she is Mother Teresa with a PhD.