Be advised, the next few words contains a term I dislike using without some form of disguise, but here goes: Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick really pisses me off!

Indeed, he’s been doing it ever since he got elected to the state’s second-highest public office.

Now he says that the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” when he criticizes the state response to the coronavirus pandemic.

He recently said old folks wouldn’t mind dying if it means the Texas economy could get restarted in the wake of the pandemic’s impact on economic matters.

Patrick sought to push that ghastly bathroom bill through the 2017 Texas Legislature, the bill that would require folks to use public restrooms in accordance with the gender noted on their birth certificate; the idea was to discriminate openly against transgender Americans.

He has punished a state senator, who happens to be a friend of mine, who made a snarky remark about a Patrick aide. Thus, he stripped Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican, of influence by removing him from the chairmanship of key Senate education and finance committees.

I cannot stand that this clown serves in such a place of power in Texas. As Ross Ramsey writes in the Texas Tribune: But a lieutenant governor is a constitutional amphibian, a rare creature of both the legislative and executive branches of government. He’s the governor when the governor is out of the state. And he’s one of two or three state leaders with ready access to the bully pulpit — the ability to get in front of the public on short notice and try to steer opinion.

It seems to me that every time he steps into that “bully pulpit,” he says things that (a) are patently offensive and (b) speak to Texans’ base and crass instincts.

This clown needs to go … somewhere far away.