The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Pity the Republicans. Here they are hoping for a miracle on the scale of Moses parting the Red Sea as a blue tsunami approaches this fall in the midterms and their one possible redemption as lackeys to the Trump mashup is to park another rightwing justice on the Supreme Court. They’ve got the votes, they’ve got their man and so they scramble headlong to get this nomination done before the elections and yeah, it looks like a winning touchdown with only a minute on the game clock. Until, wait a second! … until this woman, this Christine Blasey Ford tackler emerges out of nowhere and stops the game, timeout, timeout!

She’s got a little story to tell about an attempted rape thirty odd years ago by a 17 year old kid named Kavanaugh. It’s really an incredibly credible story. Names, places, even got a second drunk attacker and she names him too, some blackout drunk who wrote a book called, appropriately, WASTED, chronicling his sorry exploits of those drunken revelries he and the judge shared with their fellow preppies. She’s taken a polygraph and passed. She has transcripts of her therapy sessions years ago where she’s trying to work through the trauma of that night. The judge testifies he doesn’t remember this attack, says he wasn’t even there, didn’t know this woman, maybe didn’t even live in the country back then, possibly wasn’t even born yet. The blackout boy, he of course doesn’t remember anything. Who ya gonna believe?

This is the #MeToo Moment for the current Republicans, a chance to get it right after that Anita Hill mess where they victimized the victim in a nasty public tribunal of old white guys displaying ugly brutal chauvinism. The trick now, of course, is to look as if they’re seriously considering Ms. Ford’s testimony, then announcing he said, she said, then throwing up their collective hands, what are you gonna do? And then confirming a guy who more than likely did attack that woman, who is lying about it now, who has never and will never apologize for what are probably drunk actions long long ago by an intoxicated kid of 17.

Good luck with that, guyz. I read a column this morning by a woman who argued like one of the GOP’s on the Judicial Committee that it was possible Ms. Ford was suffering from mistaken identity. Different guy on top of her, she just got confused. Happens all the time, she said. Probably the best explanation for two different accounts, she said. Ho ho. Ha ha. Let’s see if that flies with the women watching this kangaroo court played out day after day. No, we don’t want the FBI looking into this. No, we can’t delay the hearings any longer. No, we need to be fair to the ‘process’. Yup, we believe Judge Kavanaugh. He did not have attempted sex with that woman.

Trust me, boyz, you need to let go of this tar baby. But we know, don’t we, you won’t. Good luck selling that to the women voters in November, pals.

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I know we’re in a hurry to confirm Kavanaugh as our next right wing Supreme Court Justice, damn the torpedoes, and I know you know that as a card carrying Trump denier I’d like to see the proceedings held up the way the McConnell crowd held up the Garland Merrick hearings until the next election nearly a year later and here we’re only talking a few weeks. Politics isn’t pretty, not for either side, and okay, it’s sausage making time again on the Hill. But c’mon, this isn’t the Clarence Thomas cover-up again, is it? Not after the #MeToo Movement.

I guess you think maybe this was old news, some attempted rape back in the ‘80’s, just a drunk rampage the Judge says he doesn’t remember and his accomplice doesn’t either. Boyz having some fun, underage drinking and a little non-consensual sex, what’s the harm? The female classmates of the victim — yes, let’s call her the victim — wrote a letter for the White House declaring Brett was a good kid. Crimes usually aren’t voted on in America except maybe for O.J. Simpson. Was the perpetrator liked on Facebook 65 times? Well, okay, one rape, 65 Likes, hmm, guess he’s good to go as Supreme Court Justice. Gimme a break. The woman took a lie detector test, for cripe sakes. And passed. She has medical records from years ago chronicling the trauma this event caused her. Thanks, all 65 of you who have no direct experience with this rape, for sticking up for the guy. And you wonder why women don’t come forward when this happens to them????

I can remember the Anita Hill circus trial. The old white guyz eviscerated her on national television. Some of those gentlemen still sit on the Judicial Committee. And Clarence Thomas is still sitting on the Court without ever asking a question. Clarence’s mizzus recently demanded an apology from Anita Hill. Before long we’ll have Kavanaugh’s wife asking the same from Christine Blasey Ford. This is the state of partisan politics in America today. Justice? Get a grip. Justice died the same sorry death Truth did in the Truth Justice and the American Way mantra. The American Way, sorry to say, is a mess.

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When I was a kid down in the red clay district of Georgia, us little munchkins did what most brats did. We played tricks on each other. You know, when we weren’t busy frying ants with magnifying glasses that concentrated infrared rays or putting frogs on railroad tracks. I know, we were bad kids. And we will no doubt have to spend the rest of our sorry lives atoning for this kind of cruelty to animals and ants. Or, if you’re Hindu, we can expect to come back in the next Rotation on the Wheel as frogs. Serves us right, I guess.

We had a kid in the hood, little Jimmy Sutton, the cop’s son who was always following us older punks around, wanting in on our games of marbles or whiffle ball, generally making a nuisance of himself, not a bad kid really, but … you know, we needed somebody as our scapegoat. We weren’t all that mean to Jimmy … except maybe one time when we fed him ‘smart pills’ to make him as intelligent as, well, us. He was hesitant to take them but the urge to be as all-fired smart as the rest of us was too much to resist and finally he took the handful of rabbit turds we’d found earlier and munched them down. I still remember the look on Jimmy’s seven year old face before he spit those smart pills out. And yeah, there’s a special place in Hell for all of us for pulling a mean-ass stunt like that on a poor little kid.

My point here, before I forget completely in a wash of self-abasement and apologetics, is that folks are too damn gullible. They believe conspiracy theories of the most outlandish variety, they believe Donald Trump tells the truth most of the time, they think science is a bunch of bunk, they read the National Enquirer, they join the weirdest sects with the most insane leaders, they watch Fox News, they believe in UFO’s and Bigfoot and haunted houses even though they’ve never seen any ghosts or flying saucers or giant hairy creatures. And worse, they’re NOT seven years old. Short of offering up a handful of rabbit turds marketed on late night TV and sold with fancy packaging down at the Nutrition Outlet as Intelligence Enhancers, I don’t know what to advise these folks. I bet Jimmy Sutton doesn’t believe these hoaxes. And for that, I hope Jimmy is grateful to us little bullies who set him straight on the road to truth, justice and what used to be the American Way. If not, I hope he’s got a good job in the White House.

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My shack’s sink has been plugged up for a couple of years and no amount of Draino or reaming with a snake or the power of prayer has opened up that damn drain. I checked the Building Codes for just running the grey water into a bucket beneath a pipe that exits the bathroom in the back and I didn’t see anything to preclude that option. Course, I didn’t look too hard. And here at the outskirts of Rome’s Reach, I figure that’s close enough.

A buddy visited recently and noticed our new kitchen sink up at the hacienda which, since he’d had a vicious encounter with the gods of plumbing, caused him to ask if I’d installed the thing myself. He obviously has forgotten he ever met me in an earlier life. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Only took two or three days, about par for me and my skill set. Why do you ask?’ Seems he’d had a leaky drain pipe under his sink and so, being a male of the species, decided to, you know, take a few minutes and fix that drip. Ho ho. Ha ha. Whee hoo, now here’s a fellow inmate who hasn’t really familiarized himself with the Laws of Plumbing. He thinks, innocently enough, naively enough, that plumbing must be fairly straightforward. Simple even. The Gods of Plumbing love us guys, so trusting, so completely unaware, such easy pickings. We are naught but toys in their cruel and capricious hands.

How did that drip repair turn out? I asked and waited for a long and terrible saga of busted pipes, spewing water, multiple trips to the hardware store or the emergency room or both. “Oh’, he said nonchalantly. ‘I tried straightening out the drain pipe where it was a bit crooked and before you know it, I broke the thing off in the wall where it was impossible to reach.’ So what did you do? I asked, still expecting a variation on my own typical plumbing horror story. ‘I ran into a plumber and I had him finish the job.’

This is probably the correct and proper ending for these stories. Hire a pro. Get a real job and pay the money. Forget your stupid pride, admit defeat and move on. This, I will tell you one more time, is NOT the South End Way. Certainly it is not MY way. I do not bow down to the sadism of plumbing deities. Sure, I bleed, I weep, I throw myself down on the sink floorboards and wail, I break tools, I break pipes, I break my back. Of course I want to quit. Of course it’s the only logical alternative. So what? If that were the Point, I’d move back to the city, buy a wardrobe and a tie to match, interview for real employment and join the mainstream.

I … am … not … going … back … to … that … America. Not even when Trump makes it great again. And no rusted pipe, corroded drain, busted waterline or anything else the Plumbing Gods can throw in my way will make me do it. No sir! Not even if I slowly have to devolve toward a shack with only cold water from a dripping faucet and a drainpipe into a hole in the ground. Not even if I end up back with my old outhouse behind the shop. There are things far worse than outdoor toilets, trust me.

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