The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We just got home from a wee vacation down at the Columbia River Gorge where we met up with old friends to hike and reminisce. We rented an old log cabin built by some biker dude who used to drive his Harley up to the location where Mt. Hood was perfectly framed beyond the orchards that dot the valley. From the antiques to the old photos on the walls, the place was like going back a century to a less complicated era. Mostly it was a respite from newspapers and politics and the impeachment hearings. To say it was a much needed tonic from those would be an understatement and a half.

But we’re back now, catching up on all things Trump and the ongoing impeachment investigation. It feels like my friend who returned from Nepal to find that returning home was more like PTSD, a head-jarring culture shock of consumer overdose and information overload. I mean, how many cereals do we possibly need glutting up an aisle or two in every grocery store from Miami to Seattle? Forget about the fact that most of them are diabetes-inducing processed crap marketed to kids who will be addicted to sugar before preschool. We want more choices, not less. We want more Trump, not less. We want our politics to be entertaining, not informative.

When we left less than a week ago, Trump and his apologists were bitching about ‘the process’, same one they used on Hillary with Benghazi, hypocrisy be damned! When the folks being interrogated testified that a quid pro quo existed between Trump and the Ukrainians, they argued at first that these people weren’t in the room, weren’t on the phone call, weren’t reliable witnesses, weren’t loyal, might even be spies and traitors. They screamed bloody murder that not every Republican Senator and Representative could be at the hearings, totally unfair, totally undemocratic. Everybody and their brother has been ordered by the White House to ignore subpoenas to appear before this witch hunt, but a few have defied that and testified anyway, probably to save their reputations and their hides. Now that transcripts are being released and testimony is under oath, well yeah, there was a quid pro quo to get dirt on Biden’s boy and find a secret server in Ukraine under a bed maybe in a farmhouse possibly outside Kiev in exchange for Congressionally mandated millions for a military fighting the Russians, they argue that if it was true, so what? Get over it, it’s done all the time, it’s how we do business.

Turns out Giuliani and Rick Perry were running an undercover State Department to get this done. You don’t hear from Rudy these days and Rick is stepping down from his cabinet post but not, he assures us, because it has anything to do with this Ukraine mess. The new line from the apologists is that okay, so it was quid and pro and quo too, it’s hardly an impeachable offense. Maybe looks bad, might even be the wrong thing to do, but not criminal, not illegal and certainly not impeachable.

The chickens are home too, to roost. The arguments from the apologists get wilder and wilder, the corner they’ve painted themselves into gets smaller and smaller. Their reasonings make as much sense as a box of Count Chocula, no nutrition, just empty calories. They’ll be adding a prize in every box soon, the way they used to when I was a naïve kid growing up in an America I thought I didn’t recognize any more. But it’s the same old con, the same old snake oil, the same old shell game. We’ve always had Trump, we just never put him in charge before.

Scientists down here in the super secret ultra-secure bio-labs of the South End have discovered a fungus that lives in the gut of a select few that self-ferments carbohydrates into alcohol. This break through, described by Dr. Lacti of the Elger Bay Institoot, opens the portal to untold riches for the savvy entrepreneur who can isolate that particular strain of fungus. Budweiser, he told a reporter from the Crab Cracker, has already shown considerable interest.

“Imagine watching the Super Bowl with all your pals,” the biologist told the Cracker, “and you take a pill then eat potato chips, say, or heavily processed crackers and voila, the carbos ferment immediately. No beer required. None of that gassy, heavy bloated feeling. By half time you’ve probably saved ten dollars. Who wouldn’t choose that?”

Dr. Lacti declined to estimate the cost of the fungi pill, but he said it probably would be a nominal cost. “Unless, of course, Budweiser buys the patent.” When asked to interview one of the subjects of the study, the doctor cited confidentiality concerns, but the Cracker, through intensive investigation, learned that the original source of the breakthrough was Fairlane Freddie who had been pulled over for DUI after a morning breakfast of pancakes with biscuits and gravy at the Diner with the Flatheads, the island vintage car club, when his 1965 Ford Fairlane was seen weaving repeatedly across lanes.

Freddie, a six year member of Alcoholics Anonymous, fought the charge and in the months before his trial, discovered that he had the rare disorder Dr. Lacti was now trying to market. “I gotta tell ya,” Freddie told the Cracker, “I thought they were crazy. Hell, I thought I was crazy. But it turns out I got Auto-Brewery Syndrome. Tell that to the Flatheads. They think I’m distilling in my car. But actually, I’m distilling in my stomach. Weird, huh? I eat a piece of toast, I’m high as a Katmandu Kite. The judge let me off thanks to Doc Lacti, but I’m not supposed to drive on pancakes anymore. Strictly eggs and bacon here on out.”

Down here on the bibulous South End, plenty of my cronies who brew nettle ales are more than a little concerned by this discovery. As Two Toke Tom confessed to me, the thought of ingesting raw nettles, fungus or no fungus, was enough to set him off on a panic attack. “It may be the end of the moonshine era, Skeeter. This damn science, what are they gonna dream up next?” I didn’t have the heart to mention Dr. Lacti was working on a self-vaping cannabis fungus. No point ruining another hobby of his. Life is plenty hard enough on us entrepreneurs.

I know a lot of you snowflakes out there on the hinterlands of the South End would like to give reparations for slavery. I get it. Of course we don’t have any descendants of slaves living on the South End, but your bleeding heart is in the right place. You, like me, probably feel guilty we don’t have people of color living down here, this being practically the white bread bastion of the island. Sure, we let Hispanics drive in for the day. Somebody’s got to mow our lawns and trim our hedges. Geez, you think our own kids are going to do that? Or us???

But while you’re emoting like crazy for the sins of our great great great great grandfathers, those genetic creeps who bought and sold human beings for fun and profit, how about a remorse or two for a real victim, the President. The guy has been under siege for three long years, subjected to the water torture of the Mueller investigation in which he declared himself totally exonerated. But what about the mental price the poor man paid? The sleepless nights, the friends who were unjustly indicted and convicted, the embarrassment of those porn star pay-offs, the judgement of Melania, the constant harassment to see his tax records, the scrutiny of his real estate empire, the whining about emoluments … and now an impeachment hearing in the House. Hasn’t the guy suffered enough?

Maybe, just maybe, a little compassion is in order here. Obviously he doesn’t need fiscal reparations. I mean, the man is a billionaire. Money means nothing to him. He tells us that every time he gets dinged for diplomats and our own government folks staying at his swank hotels. In fact, he will tell you himself that being president has cost him hundreds of millions of dollars. And he’s fine with that. Doesn’t bother him one bit. It isn’t about the money, he says again and again, it’s about service to the country. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pay him back.

So if money won’t make amends, what can a grateful nation offer to a man who has everything? And the answer, good citizens, is another few years in office for the years he lost to those witch hunts. In his own modest way he himself has broached the idea. When his term comes up, just tag on a few extra years as make-up. This would give him the time needed to finish all those programs and projects that were held up by investigations and inquiries and, let’s be honest, just mean-spirited probes by his envious enemies. Time to build the wall, time to get those trade agreements done, time to secure that Syrian oil, time to bring coal back to the heartland, time to get rid of unneeded regulations, time to cut more taxes on the already over-taxed rich. So much work to be done and so little time left. How about it? How about four or five extra years? You know he deserves it. The slaves, c’mon, that was way back when….

Watching these impeachment hearings, we can start revising the law books any time now. If you are accused of a crime, the proper defense is to accuse the prosecuting team of a similar crime. All evidence is to be considered hearsay, third party rumor because you haven’t heard it yourself, even if you have to cover your ears. The trial itself is a sham, a witch hunt, illegal, all about trying to ruin your reputation. Your family should storm the courtroom and cry kangaroo court, kangaroo court, until the judge calls for a delay or even better, a mistrial. And if you happen to be President of these United States, you can simply claim total immunity.

The evidence for soliciting favors from foreign powers in exchange for military assistance is mounting daily. Let’s be fair and balanced here, the evidence is convincing and incontrovertible. It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it craps like a duck. The Trump defenders want to ignore the evidence and instead claim the investigation is bogus, the Bidens are the really guilty ones, the Democrats never liked their guy, the hearings are being held out of public view even if their own members are privy to the testimonies, the Justice Department should never have investigated Trump in the first place, on and on with any and everything unrelated to the facts. Because the facts are damning. A President solicited foreign help in his election and threatened to withhold military aid if he didn’t get it. Period.

How do you defend that? And of course, they can’t. The process is screwed up. The press is fake. The Bidens were worse. Benghazi, what about Benghazi? Where is Hillary’s server? Up is down. Today the Barr team opened up another investigation into whether its own department was biased in investigating Trump and calling for the Mueller Report which raises some troubling questions as to the independence of the Justice Department run by the guy who said there was nothing to see in the Mueller Report. If you’re one of the very few who actually read the thing, you know that’s more than bogus. No doubt, though, they’ll hold these hearings in public, right?

Apparently the strategy of the Republicans is to toss out a smokescreen and hope we’re all so attention deficit we’ll forget what the issue was in the first place and just return to our Netflix binge-watching. They broke into the secure chambers where Schiff’s hearings were taking place, crying cover-up, when actually this is what they did with the Benghazi hearings and Clinton. No problem with closed doors back then.

Pretty soon the doors will be open and testimony will be public once these investigative hearings are over. The ducks will be quacking then too, just some other excuse that the process is corrupt, but nothing to refute the facts. In the end they may not convict Trump. Out of loyalty, out of fear. We should all be afraid.