The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I ask my MAGA buddies what it is they like about the guy they voted for, they invariably say they want a biznessman in charge. They don’t care one pronoun about Woke stuff, DEI stuff, touch-feely B.S. — they want a capitalist, a captain of industry, a corporate magnate to steer the ship of state. They couldn’t care less if he’s been bankrupt a few times. They don’t give a damn if he left his contractors holding the bag. They don’t mind that he’s a chronic liar, a convicted felon, an egotistical womanizer or … well, much of anything, really, beyond the fact that he’s a billionaire. It goes without saying, without analysis, that if he’s filthy rich, he must be a savvy entrepreneur, exactly what this country needs.

The wealthy just want a fellow 1%’er to lower their taxes, get rid of burdensome regulations, cut the government down to size and protect their interests. The bizness of America, they will gladly tell you, is bizness, pure and simple. If they get richer, if more of us get rich, the money will trickle down to everyone. Sure, they’ll get more but fair is fair. Government needs to get out of their way!

A good biznessman, most folks will tell you, hires excellent people to surround him. Experts. Professionals. Trump gets rid of these people because they aren’t Yes Men. His people, sycophants all, are there to do his bidding and to flatter him endlessly. He is, he thinks, the smartest guy in any room. He listens to his gut. That right there is his genius.

This week he put blanket tariffs on nearly every country on earth, even some with no populations unless you count penguins or migrating birds. The price of nearly every imported product will be going up. Inflation will go up. A recession will be coming up too, more than likely now, if not, worse case, a full blown world Depression. The Dow and the S&P and the NASDAQ plunged, his advisors are calling each other morons and worse, the real bizness CEO’s are running around social media with hair-on-fire five alarm incredulity.

And my buddies are now desperate to get their retirement money out of the stock market which is a roller coaster ride every day. We’re going to find out soon if we elected a biznessman. Or just a tennis shoe salesman with dreams of grandeur.

dabbling-made-easy

If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chases Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

Count me in as a huge fan of Donald J. Trump’s mission to make our government more efficient. Obviously it was a wise choice to put the richest man on earth in charge of the effort to weed out incompetency, complacency, graft and just plain sloth. If anyone knows how to downsize, it’s Elon Musk, the billionaire who cut the staff of Twitter to its core. Send him into the Department of the Treasury to root around in its highly classified files on … well, just about everyone. Our social security numbers, our financial records, all that highly sensitive data we change our passwords frequently for and need additional authentication to access ourselves. Is he a robot?

Course, as Department head, Mr. Musk sent a crew into the data banks without security clearances of any kind. I’ll leave it to you if that constitutes incompetence or potential graft (to use information for his personal fiscal aggrandizement), lack of judgement or nefarious activities. Take your pick, he’s fired.

The upper management decision to immediately eliminate USAID left shipments on the docks, in warehouses and on cargo ships. A slower rollout might have prevented this waste but no, incompetence and a reliance on gut instinct left governments and agencies scrambling. Efficiency? Not exactly, but probably the exact opposite. Someone needs to be fired!

We just came out of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu so obviously we can stop worrying about future outbreaks, might as well cut out funding for the Contagious Disease Center and the National Institute of Health, not going to need any bogus and toxic vaccines the soon-to-be head of the Department of Health and Human Services has been warning us scientifically infatuated citizens about. If he were already confirmed, we’d have to fire him. Probably could save ourselves some waste of time and reject him beforehand.

When the fires of Los Angeles swept through residential neighborhoods and firefighters ran the hydrants dry, orders went out from the highest office to have the Army Corps of Engineers open the floodgates on the dams to send billions of gallons pouring toward that imperiled city. Unfortunately no one did any research, asked any probing questions, consulted the experts no doubt in line for elimination and so those billions of gallons, unexpected by the downstream farmers, drained into fields that might need that water in the coming droughts of summer. Nothing reached L.A. Incompetence? Mismanagement? Lazy thinking? Absolutely! He should be fired! No questions asked. Pack up your belongings and vacate the White House immediately.