I’m gonna miss those goofy Larry Elder misstatements on the campaign trail. No, really

Larry Elder has had a busy week of shark-jumping.

He’s also jumped the killer whale, the moray eel, the piranha, the barracuda and any other fish with teeth.

You see, Larry Elder is a radio talk show host. I’ve known a few and some are very good at what they do. Should any of them be running for governor of California? No, because on talk radio, shark-jumping is how you draw an audience of people who wear tinfoil hats and avidly tune in because, well, they have nothing else to do.

One guy I know used to be a respectable television journalist but now he’s just a sad Trump shill.

His strategy, also shared by the ever-voluble Elder, is to throw seven observations out in one sentence, and then expect you to coherently react. You pick one factlette out of the torrent of effluent and try to respond, but he’s off to the races on whatever tangent he’s flying off to next before coherent responses occur to you.

Which brings us back to Elder.

Recently, he said that sex education has “no role in the schools at all.” He said there may be “shenanigans” in the administration of the recall election. He said that systemic racism is “a lie,” and so on.

But Elder topped his shark-jumping act with this observation on Civil War-era slave owners:

“When people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation? Like it or not, slavery was legal. Their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War, so you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War.”

Yeehaw! Jump that shark, Larry! Maybe he’ll have a statement about putting the Robert E. Lee statue in Union Square.

Mercifully, with scant days to go until the Sept. 14 election, we are running out of days when Elder can say kooky things and have anyone beyond his base of white nationalists really care.

In a way — a very small way only a political cartoonist can appreciate — I will miss the goofy spewing of the “Sage of South Central.” I predict the following events as Elder’s nutty rhetoric ratchets up until the finale of this unreality show.

SEPT. 10: LOS ANGELES – Recall candidate Larry Elder called gravity a “Newtonian hoax,” and that any falling apples on anyone’s head are “simple fruit tree assault and must be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law.”

SEPT. 11: PALO ALTO — Recall candidate Larry Elder told an audience of retired aerospace workers that there “is no credible evidence of a moon landing by the United States,” and that we still don’t have “firm evidence of the existence of Southwest Airlines, let alone priority seating by the so-called A Group.”

SEPT. 12: BAKERSFIELD – Calling House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “just another Jan. 6 riot enabler,” and a “mendacious toadie of Donald Trump,” recall candidate Larry Elder blasted the Bakersfield congressman and sandwich shop magnate as a “cosplaying anti-democracy embarrassment to California.”

Elder spokesman Ying Ma later clarified Elder’s remarks, calling them “entirely accurate, and Larry won’t make any such mistakes for the remainder of the campaign.”

SEPT. 13: FRESNO — Recall candidate Larry Elder blamed the Lake Tahoe fire on “John Cox’s rabid pyro bear” in a news conference at a gas station mini-mart.

“This time, Mr. Cox’s so-called bear says only you can prevent forest fires when we all know that Dr. Fauci and his CDC fascists may well be responsible. You just don’t know for sure.”

Caitlyn Jenner, currently trailing in any poll involving numbers, called Elder “even more silly than I am, and this is a rather difficult feat.”

SEPT. 14: SACRAMENTO — Wrapping up his campaign with a flourish, recall candidate Larry Elder called upon the Pentagon to release secret UFO files to “determine who exactly is supporting my candidacy, where they are from, why they have a massive array of radio telescope beaming my location to sharks I can jump and why they won’t let me use Area 51 to test my latest messaging.”

SEPT. 14: SAN DIEGO — The California State Association of Sharks demanded that recall candidate Larry Elder “cease and desist all shark jumping immediately. We urge a NO vote.”