The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I seem to be casting stones lately at sinners and hypocrites. Not, of course, that I am without sin. Down here on the wild South End, sin is pretty much a way of life. At least until we find beheaded bodies in the woods. There are limits, yes, even here. And lately we’re treated to a parade of sinners in the national arena who apparently have crossed the line, gone too far, taken liberties beyond the public’s tolerance for shenanigans. Judge Roy Moore jumps to mind. Donald and his extramarital flings with Playboy models. Mark Zuckerberg who wanted to be the Savior of the Digital World and now finds himself under the public microscope himself.

And now Frank Page, the Prez of the largest Protestant group in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, has stepped down over what he calls a ‘personal indiscretion’. No doubt we’ll get the sordid details in a matter of mere minutes. He has, he says, “embarrassed my family, my Lord, myself, and the Kingdom.” Give the holy man credit, at least he still can show embarrassment in an era when Judge Moore and Donald Trump can lie with straight faces. Zuckerberg, he of the whaddaya-got-to- hide philosophy, refused at first to be summoned before congressional investigative tribunals. Until the outcry grew to a thunderous din….

A good Baptist, a good Christian, would gladly forgive the sins of those who ask the Lord for that forgiveness. Confess and be returned to the flock, that’s the way. Pull a Jimmy Swaggart, let the tears flow like the River Jordan, get down on your unscuffed knees and plead for redemption. Go into exile a month or two, then come right back with those requests for tithes. Jim and Tammy Baker, Jimmy S., the thousand clowns climbing out of the VW. Me, not so much. I accept the frailty of the common man, even the President of the United States, but maybe when you present yourself as a role model, THE role model, I think you should be held to a slightly higher standard than a crappy apology and now it’s back to bizness. C’mon, boyz! You pissed your bed with or without Russian prostitutes and now it’s time to pay the Piper. You don’t get to lead the flocks, no way, no how. The Lord can forgive you if She wants, the rest of us want you gone.

Did you know the world’s richest 8 people had more wealth than the poorest 50%? You think maybe this is an April Fool joke? Faux facts? No, eight people had amassed as much riches as 3.7 billion people at the bottom of the heap. Stop and think about that for more than a nano second. Stop in your tracks. Let your jaw drop down to your knees. 8 people – 8! — with more money than 3.7 billion people combined!! 3.7 billion people in poverty, some starving of famine, some refugees from wars, some just us South Enders who maybe didn’t want to work very hard and never started up a Tech Company.

I guess I knew we had some income inequality, growing wider every year, but c’mon, this seems slightly skewed. I don’t begrudge Gates and Bezos and Buffet and Zuck a few billion, but show me the trickle down. Better yet, show the 3.7 billion people at the bottom whose only trickle is maybe a golden shower. Oh, I know I got a lot of neighbors who think whatever we do, don’t tax the rich! Because they think they might be rich one day…. You know, get an inheritance from Uncle Bezos or finally get around to that start-up tech company or reap the gains from those bitcoin investments or … more likely, win the Powerball Lottery. That, or just bottle lightning and sell it to the poor.

God forbid that we redistribute wealth!! Wouldn’t want to be accused of communism or social engineering or even basic Christian values. Those eight fellows made their money the old fashioned way, with lobbyists and sweetheart deals, with ruthless monopolies and cut-throat capitalism. Why on earth would we tax them exorbitantly when we can take the money from regressive taxation, user fees, sales taxes and other old fashioned usury? Sure, we could use those trillions to feed the poor, cure diseases, fund scientific advances, stuff like that, but you know and I do too we’d probably just build a bigger military. Kill the poor, let them die of disease and starvation, pay them as little as possible. After all, they’ll get to inherit the earth, right? Not that I’m blaming those 8 fat cat rich guys, no sir, they’re probably nice fellows, the way we’ll be when we win the Sweepstakes. I’m just saying there’s billions of folks who maybe deserve a slightly bigger piece of the pie. And I don’t mean Humble Pie.

Trump declares April National Sexual Assault Awareness Month

Somebody please tell me this is an April Fool’s Joke!! This is like Charles Manson declaring May Anti-Murder Month. Or Judge Roy Moore and Woody Allen announcing June is Leave the Little Girls Alone Month. Bill Cosby probably has July locked up for Rape Drug Truce Month. And the National Rifle Association requested an August debut of Assault Rifles for Pre-Schooler Training Month.

These are tough times for us poor souls who are tasked every year to come up with an April Fool’s joke to slip past the gullible, the unsuspecting and the literal. What is a satirist supposed to do when every day is April Fool’s Day in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave? Everything now is labeled Faux News, true or not, outrageous or not, phony or not. People believe what they want to believe and what they don’t, fake news!

The President had multiple affairs with Playboy models! Fake news! The Russians hacked and trolled the 2016 elections! Ho ho, all lies! Largest crowd ever at the Inauguration! Melania Trump entered the country on an Einstein Visa! What? You don’t believe it? We’re winning the war in Afghanistan another year! The economy is the greatest it’s ever been! Hillary Clinton was a traitor! The Trump kids are Martians!! Strange electric beams of energy have been seen emanating at night from the Washington Monument!!! Camano Island has voted to become a Sanctuary City!!!! Amazon is planning to take over the world!!!!! The Bots are coming, the Bots are coming!!!!!!!

If we now feel like Alice in Wonderland where up is down and right is wrong, how in the world do we sucker in the unsuspecting with some cockamamie story that sounds plausible but is actually a total fabrication when everything now is either a fabrication masquerading as truth or is a truth deemed phony baloney. Nobody tries to keep up with the lies anymore, we just take them for granted as part of the political landscape. The more outrageous the whopper the better, all part of the reality TV show we now live in. Every day is April Fool’s Day, but it’s harder and harder to know who the Fool is.

Down here on the cynical South End, sadly, we’ve grown accustomed to the Weird and the Fabulous. Reality has grown fangs and claws. Our neighbor was murdered and beheaded last week off Tamarack Lane. Faux news? I don’t think so. An underground bunker stocked with guns and ammo was hidden beneath a camouflaged hatch cover on the same property. Fake news? Don’t kid yourself. A killer is on the loose, our heroin thief is back and, I fool you not, so is the Barefoot Bandit. Phony news? Go ask Alice … when she’s ten feet tall. Meanwhile, Happy April Fool! And Colton, welcome back, Kid! We missed ya! And good luck on a new start. Seriously.

It seems cruel to pick on my pal Mark Zuckerberg now that everybody and their friends are piling on the poor guy when he’s down. I was just listening to an inspirational little speech he gave to his adoring employees the other day, imploring them to go out and make the world a public forum, one that would bring the world peace, capital P. It was positively evangelical. Facebook would bring love and understanding to the community space that was expanding like an exploding nova. The cheering and clapping Facebook minions ate it with a silver spoon, their faces upturned to the jumbotron the way Apple worshippers used to gaze at Steve Jobs. Somewhere in the back they must have been pouring Kool-Aid into those ubiquitous water bottles everyone carries with them to hydrate. Enlightenment Now! Kum Bah Yah!

A few blogs back I was mumbling about Bill Gate’s comments concerning the future of Artificial Intelligence, how he thought it would probably be positive, robots cleaning up spills on the factory floors and all, and my take was here was one of the guys who brought us personal computers but didn’t have a real keen sense of where his innovations might ultimately lead. Give him credit, he’s a little busy curing malaria and other world diseases, not much time to ponder the ramifications of Microsoft down the road to the future which is now in our rearview mirror.

Mark Zuckerberg put together a social club, mostly a way to hook up his Ivy League pals, then kept extrapolating, turned it into a global network of ‘friends’. Got himself some folks who knew how to monetize it, went public and now has billions in corporate worth. Or, I guess we should say, had. That stock of theirs is bleeding bitcoins with all the investigations into information sharing with everybody from Russian bots to the Trump campaign to every advertiser on the planet. Did Mark have a far-reaching vision of where things would lead?

I think he did. Just not a real accurate one. Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men? Looks like he saw himself as Santa. Or Jesus Christ. Either way, kind of missed the mark, Mark. Instead, you opened us all up like a corporate can opener, like we were a Pandora’s box you thought you knew what was inside of but really didn’t. You turned us all into marks, targets for advertisers, targets for politicians, targets for Russian bots. You laid the groundwork for faux news, for a world where truth and fiction become indistinguishable, where charlatans undermine democracy and demagogues become presidents. You made a fortune, Markie. You made a mess too. Thanks for the Big Vision. Oh, and thanks for the Kool-Aid.

Every day I hear from friends who are alarmed and depressed by the current State of the Union. Democracy itself hangs in the balance, they say. War is imminent, they tell me. Racism is on the rise, they cry. The economy will go down the toilet, they moan. Idiots and imbeciles are running the government, they write. The sky is falling, the sky is cracking up, they scream.

I confess, there are days, even weeks, when I feel exactly the same way. Liberal Malaise. Progressive Polio. Left Wing Lassitude. It seems like it can’t get worse, then it does. Stormy Daniels spanks the President with a rolled up magazine bearing his mug on its cover. After he’s pulled down his pants. Then he tells her she reminds him of his kid daughter Ivanka. Sure, we feel queasy. Who wouldn’t outside Judge Roy Moore? He hires John Bolton as his national security advisor, the guy who still thinks the Iraq War was a smart move and whacking Iran and North Korea would be even better. I guess I feel nervous, all that talk of who’s got the bigger nuclear button on his desk. Now we got a trade war starting up, mostly against our allies. You could question the intelligence of this, I suppose, and yeah, I do. But what do you expect when half the cabinet and advisors are the flotsam from Fox and Friends?

You know in your heart the Russians got something nasty on our Commander-in-Chief. Something so embarrassing he’s willing to kowtow to about anything they pull, from Crimea to Ukraine, from nerve gas murders to election manipulations, something even the Donald would shrink from having become public. Pissing prostitutes on film, who knows? Something even worse? C’mon, in this era of daily outrage, why not?

But I have to remind myself and my horror stricken liberal pals, this is the same country that elected Obama, not once, but twice. The same nation that leapfrogged from a homophobic country to one that has made gay discrimination illegal. And even included the trans community! You think that was possible a few years ago?? Now we have the #MeToo movement, the kids protesting the proliferation of guns, the Black Lives Matter movement.

I know, we still got a bullying, narcissistic, ignorant real estate huckster for a President. We voted him in, a majority of us. I have to think, though, we’ll see he has no clothes. And not just when Stormy is whacking his ass with his own face. God Bless America. When She stops laughing.

In the latest White House revolving door, here’s yer hat, what’s yer hurry? incident, President Trump announced that he was replacing his vice president, Mike Pence with Fox News analyst Sean Hannity. “I watch Sean all the time and I have to say, the man is brilliant. He agrees with me 99% of the time.” When asked how an elected official such as the Vice President could be legally and constitutionally fired, Mr. Trump stated that his stable of lawyers had assured him he was the President and could do whatever he wanted. “I want Sean Hannity,” the Commander-in-Chief declared. “I don’t want a yes man, I want a Hell Yes! Man.”

Following on the heels of the President’s hiring of John Bolton as National Security Advisor and Larry Kudlow as economic advisor, both Fox commentators, as well as a few others from the Fox network in lesser roles, the White House team now looks more and more like it’s finally Fair and Balanced. The President feels comfortable with his new inner sanctum and rumors abound that the purging of the first year’s cabinet has only just begun. Fox News is scrambling to fill its vacant seats by hiring interns straight out of high school, primarily students who refused to march against the NRA gun lobby. Unfortunately there aren’t as many as there are vacancies.

Team Trump, aka Faux Fox, seems positioned to reinvent government and while not entirely fulfilling campaign promises to ‘drain the swamp’ of D.C., they certainly are poised to tip the ship of state and sail on without the original crew of what are now seen as Deep Staters. The S.S. Donald is steaming full speed ahead into turbulent international waters, manned by Fox sycophants and psycho-rants who happily applaud the captain in his search for white whales and beached bikini models. Network ratings are through the roof, the Skipper exulted. ‘Like nothing before. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Where oh where is Gilligan when we need him?

I think the saddest story I heard all week — and as you know, there were plenty coming out of the White House — was the one where Karen McDougal apologized to Melania for the affair she had with Melania’s husband Donald J. This is the stuff of trashy novels, soap operas and high-minded porn films, but the sad part was she loved the jerk. I know, it’s hard to imagine, but maybe we judge the man too harshly. Something underneath that braggart exterior, deeper than the bullying and the lying, more complex than the 10 year old angry punk who has a germ phobia, must be loveable. Vulnerable. Attractive to a Playboy model anyway.

Maybe we’re all too sensitized by the faux news stories that depict our President as a moron, a mean-spirited monster, a shallow dildo of a man interested in only himself and his next sexual and/or political conquest, a greedy knee-jerk real estate huckster who, despite winning the highest office in the world, still wants to sell Trump MAGA hats. An imbecile who Karen McDougal fell in love with over a prolonged affair. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve judged the man too harshly.

Who knows? Maybe he had a tough childhood. A cruel father. A mother who bottle fed him skim milk. A nanny who sexually abused the boy. An allowance so low he had to buy used Chevys. We don’t know what molded the man, do we? But Karen might. Karen was intimate with him. Karen loved him. And she thought maybe he loved her for more than her centerfold personality. Well, until he offered to pay her. And of course then she felt like … not the love of his life. Like … well, a woman who gave him sex and was now in a fiscal negotiation.

You think that isn’t sad?? You think maybe that’s the saddest sorry story you heard this week. It makes the Stormy Daniels tell-all coming up tomorrow on 60 Minutes look like a com/rom movie. Stormy didn’t love the jerk, she’ll be the first to tell you. And she wasn’t hurt and humiliated when he paid her to keep their tryst quiet. It was, after all, just a business deal. Maybe not too artful, but a deal’s a deal. And they’re made to be broken, as Donald has said many times. That right there is the Art of the Deal. And Karen, a word of advice, the next boyfriend, be a better judge of character. If he acts like an asshole, chances are, he probably is.

Last season’s episode of the Wild Women of the West Wing ended with Melania storming out of the White House after an explosive argument with her husband concerning which of his last two affairs was his favorite, Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal. The Donald refused to answer her questions but eventually claimed he’d never met either woman. This cliffhanger set the stage for what promises to be a hilarious round of legalistic semantics in this coming season.

Season Two of WWWW begins with the Donald fuming in the White House as 60 Minutes airs the Stormy Daniel interview. Hysterical comedy ensues as the Prez’s personal attorney threatens to sue the sassy porn star for millions over violation of a non-disclosure agreement DJD never signed. And an affair he claims never to have had.

Meanwhile a constant stream of advisors and cabinet members rotate through the second season’s episodes in a kaleidoscopic blur of firings and hirings. The cast by the second season is larger than Spartacus. At one point the President shouts at Kellyanne Conway, “Bring me more bodies! Bring me more bodies!!” If you thought Season One was preposterously hilarious, Season Two promises to up the ante on farcical absurdity to levels never seen before on daytime TV.

The producers, Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort, promise plenty more shenanigans in the second season of this Emmy nominated series. Two or more spin-offs are in the works from Alt-Right Stay Left Productions, the successful folks behind WWWW told Fox and Friends just yesterday. The Sarah Huckabee Sanders Truth or Dare Show is in the final planning stages and filming has already begun on Firing Line, starring Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe and Robert Mueller, a 10 part HBO original critics have given rave reviews. ‘Gone with the Wind meets South Park’, one anonymous critic said. ‘Racism never played with such comedic flair. Dark and twisted, but hilarious.’

Strap yourself in for a wild ride with the Stormy Season Two’s first episode until its exhilarating surprise finale. Season One is available on Netflix streaming.

Well, Mark Zuckerberg has told us for years that privacy is a thing of the past. In fact, he thinks we should embrace a completely public existence and just to help us out, Facebook opened up its vaults of your personal information to a political team called Cambridge Analytica working for Donald Trump. Cambridge Analytica harvested –I love that word — harvested data from 50 million Facebook users to use in the 2016 presidential campaign. Thanks, Mark!

Facebook attorneys point to the disclosure clauses all Facebook suckers agreed to in defense of their lack of security. You signed up, you gave up your rights, read the fine print, boys and girls. Somehow, though, I don’t think a legalistic defense is going to help these folks whose vision of the company apparently never included a premonition of what was coming. Russian bots, faux news stories, data mining, alt-right hoaxes, phony baloney trollers, political operatives and shady ‘friends’.

I have my own problem with the idea of Facebook as a public forum, but why air that opinion one more time? If folks want to sex-text, if the neighbors want to reveal to any and all what their favorite pizza topping is, if this is the way families and friends communicate in the 21st century, be my guest. Mark’s your guy. Me, I didn’t move lock stock and crackerbarrel down to the South End of a little known island so I could tell you my secrets. It’s why we call em secrets. And no, I don’t think it’s a crime against society to keep my privacy. Even if, as we all know, the security cameras, the GPS cellphone tracking, the Google algorithms, the entire tilt of the future is toward eliminating the individual and celebrating the public. Big Brother is definitely here, he just turned out to be a corporation, not the government, not the Deep State. And all he asked, in return for instant communication and information, was that you ‘friend’ him. Trust him. Serve him. Obey him. Read the fine print, it’s right there between the lines….