Pete Buttigieg is back in South Bend where he belongs, bending south. Tom Steyer is back home contemplating climate change and grasping that his world ended quicker than the 11 years he anticipated awaiting him. Kirsten Gillibrand is back in New York, leaving New Yorkers wondering how, if their state is so prominent and so important, they ended up with such a joke as one of their two U.S. senators. Kamala Harris is back in California, with Californians wondering much the same as New Yorkers. Robert O’Rourke is back at the Texas dentist or ear-hair barber, presumably telling anyone who cares to listen that he was just meant to be in it. Deval Patrick presumably is giggling that he entered the presidential race so late and dropped out so fast that, for all we know, his campaign may not even have had time to spend the money raised. Cory Booker — I don’t remember, was he in the race? There is the mystic peace-and-love author, Marianne Williamson, who dropped in from some planet and then had to return back to space command for reassignment. Andrew Yang, also long gone, but still paying some people to live. And there even was a brief visit from some jerk named Swalwell.

All it took was four states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. So crazy. Each of the departed heroes once filled with such bombast, now depleted of air. Each declaring President Trump an idiot. Each so much smarter and more qualified than he. Each certain that “the American people” would throw out Trump and select them. Each with 15 minutes of fame, a cheering section at CNN and MSNBC. And each now revealed to be — how shall we put it kindly? — a loser, a flop, a has-been edited out of history’s footnotes.

It amazes in retrospect that there exist egos so overblown and unwieldy that they have the temerity to think themselves capable, or even worthy, of leading the greatest country on Earth, the most powerful, the most generous. Whence do they get that craziness? What sick notion enters the mind of an Andrew Yang or a Swalwell that tells him it now is his time to deal with Vladimir Putin on behalf of 300 million Americans? For Marianne Williamson, I get it. She had acolytes willing to put up the dough, and she leveraged the publicity to sell more books — capitalism at its best. I had never heard of her, and now I know she has written books. Obviously, I am not going to buy one, but this country is chock full of suckers. So I respect that capitalism. Maybe that also was Yang’s ploy: run for president for a few weeks, get into a debate or two, and then leverage the fame to pick up serious honoraria for speeches and to open new doors to more investors to make more millions. If that was what motivated Williamson, and if that was Yang’s yin, then I like it.

But what craziness would convince a Robert O’Rourke, whose résumé honestly has nothing more intriguing than his past as a hit-and-run villain and his association with computer hackers, to believe that he was born to be in it? With his background, he more likely was born to be in prison. And they provide free dental care and ear-waxing there. Indeed, that was the culmination of another exciting Year 2020 Trump Challenger campaign, the presidential aspirations and stylings of Michael Avenatti. For weeks and weeks, he traded on the curious fame that our society accords to advocates for pole dancers, and he would appear on CNN, MSNBC, and the whole gamut of other “news” talk shows, opining on current events, world affairs, and floating his presidential intentions. Today he is a proud member of that section of the bar association that includes the likes of fellow legal practitioner Michael “Cash Cab” Cohen. Perhaps they will share a cell and spend their future years recording each other. As for the presidential race that Avenatti hallucinated pursuing, it seems ironic that a guy so obsessed with the Nike corporation never got to run.

As for Steyer, at least he certainly seems to have broken no laws. Yet, here in California, the radio has been jammed with his ads, explicitly stating that he is going to “kick” President Trump’s derriere. His ads actually use the three-letter word that rhymes with “crass.” It fascinates that the networks will censor and refuse to run pro-life advertising that is too graphic when depicting the actual life being snuffed in an abortion, and yet the CBS radio network actually allowed that Steyer ad, with that explicit profanity, to run all day every day for weeks. Imagine trying to rear a child in today’s society with some decency, and then having the radio on to hear the news headlines at the top of the hour, and suddenly a billionaire is on radio promising to “kick” the president’s “a–.” The only salve is that a parent can tell his or her child, “You see, how that very bad man with that very filthy mouth said those words on the radio? And do you know what happened to that naughty man? The people who voted in South Carolina said to him that they want him to stop trying to be president because he is so naughty and because his father and mother never taught him how to speak nicely. And do you know what? That bad man, with all his billions of dollars, was forced to stop running for president. And now we do not have to hear him and his very bad words anymore.”

And good riddance to Amy Klobuchar for the vicious way she berates and abuses her staffers. Klobuchar’s employees not only know it but also have discussed it with the media. Behind Klobuchar’s phony plastic smile, there reposes an evil villain. Klobuchar will be dropping out sooner than expected. Once she stopped eating salads with hair combs and started reading the vote results on the newspapers that she presumably uses beneath them for table cloths, she grasped that she got only a pitiful 12 percent of the vote in Iowa. Four percent in Nevada. Three percent in South Carolina. Her collapse in the primaries was even more dramatic than that of the Dow Jones index. The Dow Jones bounces back. Klobuchar merely got bounced.

So we now are left with four, the cream of this year’s Democrat crop. One of them is an outright communist, just what America needs now that every other country that ever tinkered with communism has disavowed it or, in the alternative, has retained it to preserve its prison state, hunger, and torture features. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist; he is a communist. Interesting, isn’t it, that no member of the Corrupt Journalist Corps will clarify the terminology? They have no problem superimposing onto normative decent conservatives an extreme canard calling them “fascists,” so they know the terminology for political extremism. Yet they will not call Sanders a communist, even though he is. He loves communism and wants to bring communism to America. He honeymooned in communist Russia and celebrated their bread lines and their pretty subways. He extols Castro’s Communist Cuba education system. He lauds Mao’s Communist China efforts to feed the people. He supported Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. Sanders is an out-and-out communist and a vile anti-Semite — two institutions that go together like bread and butter, except that communist societies have bread shortages and never have butter.

When Sanders goes on a stage and says that even if you don’t like Castro for being a dictator you have to give him credit for improving the schools, I ask myself, would Sanders say that even if you did not like Mussolini for being a fascist dictator, you have to admit that he got the trains running on time? Or even if you don’t like Hitler for putting people in gas chambers and ovens and launching a war that caused the deaths of some 85 million people comprising 3 percent of the world population, you gotta admit that he sure fixed the German economy (until Dresden). Sanders won’t say that because he is a communist and finds the good only in the likes of Mao, Stalin, Chavez, and Castro.

He is opposed by Joe Biden. Biden represents the other diseased wing of the Democrat Party. After getting wiped out in Caucasian New Hampshire and in Latino Nevada, Biden salvaged his campaign for another day by trouncing all others with the Black voters of South Carolina. Here is a guy who has said so many racist things against Blacks and others, that Black mothers do not speak to their children so the kids grow up with no vocabulary, that schools in Black communities do more poorly than those in Iowa because they are filled with Black children, that 7-Eleven stores are for Pakistanis and people from India. The nicest thing he ever said publicly about Blacks was when he complimented Barack Obama for being clean. I just do not get how Blacks can regard this carpetbagger as their friend. Maybe they figure: Look, the guy doesn’t really know what he’s saying or even where he is, so it is the Christian thing to shower the poor boy with love. Maybe that’s it.

Then we have Bloomberg. His strategy is just to buy the election. As a capitalist, I am intrigued by the concept. Money talks. And given the words that come out of Bloomberg’s mouth — calling farmers and factory workers idiots, describing his policies to throw Black boys up against the wall, and making his explicit, offensive, and unfunny jokes and other doozies about women — it is wise to let his money do his talking while he keeps working on coming up with his first joke that actually is humorous. Can he actually buy the nomination? Maybe. If people whom Joe Biden spent a lifetime mocking and insulting still flock to vote for him, who is to say that others will not flock to vote for a guy whose basic message is, “Look, I am richer than you. I am smarter than you. I know what’s best for you to eat and drink. So just stop wasting my time. Vote for me, and I will own you.” Who knows? Maybe that resonates, although Tom Steyer’s rapid disintegration seems to augur less hopefulness for the strategy that an election can be purchased.

That leaves an angry and nasty Paleface, Elizabeth Warren. Yes, she is a Nasty Woman. We all know that. Her anger, vitriol, and nastiness come out in every syllable uttered by her thin, high-pitched, whining, cracking voice. Warren’s campaign essentially is over, and the reservation awaits her return. From 18 percent in Iowa, she torpedoed in New Hampshire to 9 percent, even though that state is adjacent to hers and gets Massachusetts television and radio stations. Then 9 percent again in Nevada and 7 percent in South Carolina. There seem only two conceivable reasons that she continues to hang around and annoy with that screech. First, she is so green with envy, so jealous of Bloomberg’s billions, and she never again will have such an opportunity to attack a billionaire to his face before a national audience, as she works through whatever inadequacies drive her as someone who leveraged a false “Indian” claim to build a personal wealth of only $12 million. Second, she undoubtedly is angling for a powwow with Sanders to be his running mate. Warren is the only person out there as far left and as jealous of others’ successes as he. Not only would they make a marketable sandwich — white bread and tongue — but they also would make a lovely ticket. One is a Jew who hates and despises Jews, calls the Jewish voters of Israel racist, and enjoys endorsements and surrogate support from the country’s most prominent anti-Semites: Linda Sarsour, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. And a running mate claiming to be an “American Indian” who has been rejected unequivocally by the Native American community. Two extreme leftists rejected by members of their respective tribes. It will be fun to watch each one’s last stand.