The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“Don’t Be Afraid of Covid”

Whoo hoo, a couple of days in Walter Reed with the best medical care taxpayer money can provide and our Leader wants us to know there is nothing to be afraid of with this so-called pandemic. Just a little bitty virus. Can’t even see it. Might not even be real but if it is, it’s tiny, nothing to worry about. The 215,000 dead folks in his country, not to mention the one million worldwide, might differ. If they were alive.

The man drinks his own Kool-Aid obviously. He hops in a car with a few poor Secret Service men so that he can wave at his fans out on the street, forget worrying about the men who risk catching the disease in close quarters with him, he has an adoring throng to wave at through his tinted window. I bet these guys have something to fear. The idiocy of this is beyond comprehension. Just keep telling the public everything is fine, the plague is almost over, kids need to get back in schoolrooms, businesses need to get back to work. Nothing to see here, just move along, folks, everything is under control. To prove it, he shows a video of himself signing important documents, obviously no virus is going to keep our superman bedridden. So what if the papers are blank, he’s doing the people’s work.

That optic works for me. Blank pages, big signatures. The glass isn’t half full or half empty, the glass has a hole in the bottom. This pandemic, c’mon, it’s a hoax. Not gonna fool our President. He was back in the White House PDQ. Course, the intensive care unit and half the attending physicians are there too. Just in case he has trouble breathing like he did two days ago. Wouldn’t look good to let this hoax thing get out of control.

Meanwhile the folks who won’t wear masks, who crowd into bars and restaurants in states that agree with the President, who watched him bounce the coronavirus off his chest in no time flat, they’ll keep spreading the disease and they’ll vote for the guy who tells them science is wrong and they’re right.

I say don’t be afraid of Covid, be afraid of Trump. But then, I might just be a coward.

My mail lady drove up our long driveway yesterday to deliver a package. She’d driven past my shack and tried to find me there, but no … so she drove up to the house and I came out to get my mail and my package and to thank her, once again, for going a bit beyond expectations. Today her boss is being grilled by the House of Representatives for pulling mail boxes out of cities, for yanking huge sorting machines from post offices and for slowing down delivery. I’m expecting next week they’ll stop issuing stamps.

In 1775 the colonies started the first national post office with none other than Ben Franklin as its chief. Two and a half centuries, if my math is close. There are those who argue the Postal Service should be privatized, the same folks who don’t trust the one we got with delivering fairly and promptly this year’s mail in ballots. Right. Let the CEO’s have a shot at it. Course when they have to deliver to the last mailbox in Noplace, Utah or Backwash Camano, you can bet the cost of a stamp will shiver yer timbers.

I might worry a little more about this absentee and mail-in ballots if I weren’t so worried about polling machines that keep no paper trail. I might worry too if the President himself wasn’t mailing his own in. I’ve been voting by mail for a long time now, better than hauling down to the Little Church in the Ravine to vote like I did the first decade or so when I moved here. Something kind of creepy about casting ballots in a church, you ask me. And I know you didn’t.

So yeah, I’m a big fan of the Post Office. Call me a socialist and knock my hat crooked, but when something is working, why break it? And, in full disclosure, I’m still one of those anachronists who write handwritten letters, one sitting right here ready to take down to the mailbox. Old habits are hard for me to break, I guess.

So much for the disease that was a hoax. So much for mocking those who wear a mask. So much for that ‘cure’ the President took himself. So much for the disease that would disappear, the one that the Chinese cooked up. Those happy days are gone. Trump is officially the latest statistic.

I know none of you wish our man in the high tower ill. Or his loving wife. We’re not partisan rabid animals, after all, hoping for tragedy to befall our beloved President. But speaking for myself, I was happy he caught the Covid. If anyone deserved a dose, this was the guy, the one who knew how bad the pandemic would be back in winter but decided not to panic the populace. The one who said behind closed doors this virus outbreak would be fine since he wouldn’t have to shake peoples’ hands any longer. The heartless character who wanted to go back to normal and if that meant sacrificing a few folks, so be it, the economy needed saving too. The happy warrior that claimed no one had come down with coronavirus at one of his maskless rallies. That guy.

Of course this could just be more fake news. An April Fool’s joke in October. Just kidding, folks, the Donald might tweet today, Gotcha! His doctor might roll out on Fox and Friends to say his patient was doing just fine, nobody on Planet Earth could beat a virus like his boy could beat a virus. Nobody. The man is a rock. Healthiest president ever! He could armwrestle Teddy Roosevelt to a whimpering cry of Uncle. We shouldn’t worry that the man is old or obese, risk factors for others, not for Dynamo Donald. He’s up in his room watching Fox, eating burgers, swilling diet pop. He’s fine, worry about the virus.

Better yet, or worse, worry about the folks he exposed the past few days. Sleepy Joe was quite a distance away behind his podium, but hellfire, a constant stream of projectile insults were spewing in wave after wave of covid tsunami. Pity the folks in meetings, pre-rally gatherings, staff, reporters from Breitbart. Better get tested, folks. The hoax is real. The joke’s on you. Now, just maybe, you’ll see we’re all in this together. Denial is no longer immunity.

I’m old enough to have seen more than my fair share of Presidential debates, some good, some not so good. I can remember Nixon sweating under the hot lights in the Kennedy debates. I remember poor Quayle in the Veep debates trying to summon the ghost of Kennedy before his opponent said he knew Jack Kennedy, he was a friend of Jack Kennedy, and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy. I watched George Herbert Bush looking at his watch, bored with the whole proceedings. Mostly I remember candidates squaring off on issues, debating substance, looking for a right hook to the chin that would finish off their adversary.

Last night I watched a debate, if we can call it that, like nothing I’d ever seen before, not even the Trump/Clinton smackdowns. This one, well, what do we make of it? Unhinged? Deranged? Unsightly? All of the above? Sure, let’s be generous, it was all of the above and a lot more. An uglier performance would be hard to imagine without punches literally thrown, hair pulled, shirts torn, biting and scratching with overturned podiums and microphones used as mallets. It was live wrestling without the wrestling.

I guess the President figured if he simply bullied and interrupted continually, his flustered opponent might become so exasperated he’d make gaffe after gaffe. All Biden really had to do was look halfway composed, even a bit confounded by the flailing Trump. What Trump must have been thinking is anybody’s guess. At least until he got to the pointed questioning by moderator Wallace whether he would condemn white supremacists. Kind of a softball really. Just say sure, you bet, who wouldn’t? Instead he flustered and blustered, asked who Wallace was talking about, what right wing hate groups, only to have the helpful Biden suggest the Proud Boys. ‘Stand back and stand by’, the President of the United States answered immediately.

Holy KKK, Batman, are you k-k-kidding? The head of the FBI just finished testifying in Congressional hearings the biggest threat to this country was right wing extremists and you’re calling on one of the most organized of the racist bunch to stand by??? Stand by for what, Mr. President? Shock troops to protect the white suburban women of America?

Nobody expects clarification today, nobody expects an apology. I remember when George Wallace ran for President. I didn’t know George Wallace, I was no friend of George Wallace, but you, Mr. Trump are definitely a George Wallace. Mission accomplished, Mr. President. Mission sadly accomplished. Trust me, no one needs to sit through another debate like this. Put a fork in your eye, you’re done. Deservedly so ….

If you claimed to be worth 10 billion dollars, and you probably don’t, you might expect to pay some serious pesos to the IRS every year. I mean, unless you had a few legitimate deductions. Like bankrupt casinos, say. Or payouts to porn queens to maintain a discreet silence. But would it seem unlikely that in the past 15 years you paid out nothing for 10 of those and 750 bucks two of those years? Mr. T., when asked about this, claimed he had paid very large amounts. We’ll see them as soon as the audits are completed, he told us again. Those audits apparently are very slow.

I suspect that in Mr. T’s mind, 750 bucks is excessive. I would tell you that my own were 10 times that, but … you’ll have to wait until my own audit is complete. What I can say without advice from my fixer — I mean my attorney — is that most of us in this country pay 10 times that. Right off hand, the only folks I know who pay what Donald pays are Amazon and GE and about 50 other corporations on the Fortune 500. This is what is called capitalism and if you’re scared pantless about encroaching socialism, trust me, the vultures have already eaten your BVD’s so quit sweating, you’ve been taken to the cleaners already.

In America the rich write the tax laws. The rich can afford lawyers and tax accountants who can decipher the legalese and navigate the labyrinth. It may be that everything these corporations and Trump Inc. declare as legitimate deductions are on the up and up. 70,000 dollars for his haircuts? Well, the man has to look his best. 100,000 for Ivanka’s stylist? Sure, why not? I spent 15 dollars on my one haircut last year and I forgot to deduct it. Stupid me. I once went to England and my buddy who was an accountant said let’s go to a cathedral, look at the stained glass and you can write off the whole trip. I said I couldn’t do that. He said it’s perfectly legal. I said it might very well be, but it wouldn’t be right. Stupid me.

While giving the wealthy tax breaks, we’re running up trillion dollar deficits. As the pandemic lockdowns drag the poorest of us into crisis mode, we stopped giving unemployment aid to the worst off. If any of you think we’re all in this predicament together, I have a golf course in Florida you might like to buy. Great tax deduction when you add up the losses.