The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

So okay, we all know the impeachment trial is going to be coming soon to a theater near you. With clowns like Rudy and Mick, personal advisors to the stars, denying any wrongdoing while admitting the same, it’s only a matter of time before we quit horsing around and just get on with it. Of course, Trump isn’t going to allow anyone to testify, pleading everything from executive privilege to witch hunt the sequel. What to do other than wait for the Supreme Court to make a ruling and that could take two days this side of forever.

I want to make a suggestion in the spirit of bipartisanship, one that should make everyone happy, Dems and GOP alike: offer to hold the impeachment trial at Mar-a-Lago. Donald will make a fortune, not that he needs it, but obviously he wants a pay for play in just about every endeavor this White House undertakes. And televise it. Give every TV outlet a chance to bid, then take the highest offer and give it to Donald. Tremendous ratings, high visibility for weeks, PLUS a ton of loot. The Trump Brand will never be more monetized. And after all, isn’t that why he ran in the first place? Make America Great Again? C’mon, we’re not in kindergarten here. Make Donald Rich Again is the real slogan.

And what a cast of characters! Netflix could do a binge to addiction 60 episode series with this. Dallas meets West Wing. Golf courses of the rich and famous meets Hell’s Kitchen. Billionaires on the witness stand. Generals testifying against their old boss, now who’s fired! Bring in the kids, haul up Melania. It’s a fashion show, it’s a kangaroo court, it’s Saturday Night Live Live! Every laptop, TV, pay for view theater in America will be riveted for weeks, hopefully months. The 2020 elections will look like the cartoon before the movie. The residuals and spin-offs should be astronomical. Interviews with Mike Pence, questions about pardons, angry Senators, Benghazi Benghazi what about Benghazi, all the old but never dead accusations, Ukrainegate, Rudy and more Rudy, who can possibly get enough? If we’re lucky, we get a hurricane too. Give the man his Mar-a-Lago moment and let’s get this show on the road!

No doubt a lot of you South Enders are considering dressing the kids up in spooky Halloween gear this festive holiday. William Barr big and tall suits, Lindsay Graham chameleon outfits, Mitch McConnell Moscow Mitch garb complete with sable fur hat, Mike Pence robot costume with the fake smile and dead eyes. Used to be we just went as skeletons and ghosts, but they wouldn’t scare a mom on meth these days. Heroin addict with the phony needle stuck out an arm, nope, too commonplace. Franklin Graham with a scratch n sniff Bible, uh-uh, the evangelists only scare their flock these days. Rudy Giuliani with the Humpback of Notre Dame slouch, that should scare the kiddies. If not, try the Kellyanne Conway mask with the vampire teeth. Looks frighteningly real. For a zombie.

It’s trick or treat every day in Trump’s America. Tricks if you’re worried about the demise of democracy, treats if you think the government needs to be flushed down a toilet. There’s really not much in the middle. Instead of moving the outhouse back a few feet we have new pranks to raise the hair on the unsuspecting. How about pulling troops out of Syria without any preparation whatsoever or consultation with the generals or the State Department? If that didn’t scare you, this might dirty your diapers: try to make a deal with a country under attack from the Russians, hold up their military assistance mandated by Congress, in exchange for help finding something, anything, to smear Biden and his kid.

Quid pro quo — which is scarier, the Latin or the reality? Half the folks you knock on their door with your pillowcase half full of emoluments wouldn’t know a quid from an octopus, no problem with their President looking out for himself against the corruption of Hillary and Uncle Joe. Bad people. Benghazi. Now there’s a spook house, Benghazi. Full of goblins and Moslems and who knows what else in there. Haunted as hell. Just the name, just saying it out loud one million times, scares the bejabbers out of people. So what if they couldn’t tell you where Benghazi was, is, or who. Was Benghazi a terrorist leader? Frankenstein’s brother? A pandemic disease? Yikes! Benghazi is coming, Benghazi is coming!! Lock the doors, pull the shades. Nobody home, go away, please go away….

The night is full of bogey-men, best to stay home, turn off the fake news. If the pranksters light a bag full of dog doo on your porch, let it burn. What have you got to lose, right? Around the South End, back up the hollers where folks have kids and the houses are still affordable, the yards are littered with plastic gravestones and giant spiders, the dead rising from between the abandoned bikes and broken toys, the cobwebbed trees without leaves now looking skeletal and creepy, Halloween is here a month early. Up the road where the gated folks hide behind keycoded gates, the Trump 2020 signs, like autumn mushrooms after a cold rain, push up into view, no candy here, kids, we’re keeping it all for ourselves.

This year I’m thinking of chaining their gates, multiple locks, titanium chain. Lock em in!, Lock em in! They’ll regret not having an outhouse…..But they got one in the White House.

How long, Lord, how long? Not even the most addicted binge-trained Netflix junkie can sustain the marathon attention span required to wade day after day through the Trump travesties. Emoluments, foreign interventions, bungled military maneuvers, allies bashing, cabinet firings, juvenile letters to foreign leaders, professed love of despotic dictators, sure, it’s wild stuff at first, but … c’mon, year after year and nobody seems to break a rash to call for an intervention, much less an impeachment. The man told an adoring crowd in Texas this week that it was easy to be presidential. But it was too boring.

Boring, this yahoo is not. He’s a 1000 clowns crammed into a Vee Dub bug, he’s the guy standing on the Golden Gate Bridge threatening to throw himself off, he’s the maniac holding hostages in the daycare, the sniper in the tower, the guy who calls at 2 in the morning to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast radio show to describe his alien medical exams, the bozo who has a new conspiracy theory every day, the man who calls the gossip columns to brag about his latest conquest, the rich guy who declares bankruptcy with casinos. Boring he’s not. Certifiable, absolutely. A good businessman, not really. A great politician, you tell me, but we know he wins.

He’s abrasive, rude, infantile, narcissitic, mean as a snake, a groper, greedy, a liar, a tax fraud, a thug. He’s the New American. Ugly but proud of it. He’s the spokesperson for white nationalists, the KKK, the closet racists, the bullies, the wife beaters, the Jew haters, the people who want immigrants sent home. He claims to want to make America Great Again but he couldn’t care less. More of the American Pie is what he wants, what he craves, what he feeds on. We know this guy and half of us love him. Half of us would gladly give up our freedoms for a chance to stomp on someone else. Half of us see political correctness as a brake on our natural inclination to be something moral, something decent, something we have no desire to be.

I don’t understand it and I’m sure Trump doesn’t understand it, but by god, he has channeled something dark and sinister that courses through the American bloodstream as surely as genocide and lynchings, spousal abuse and pederasty. He’s the disease that turns septic in the body politic, the grinning ghoul in the mirror of our national history we’ve tried not to look too closely at, but here he is. Heeeere’s Donny!

Remember when folks cheered the confirmation of generals to cabinet posts, hoping they would be the ‘adults’ in the room with our bratty, narcissistic boy President? Now, of course, they’re all gone, leaving Trump with mostly himself as advisor and apologists like Mick and Rudy to come out and explain what the infantile Commander-in-Chief really meant to say. James Mad Dog Mattis left his post as Defense Secretary awhile back, citing irreconcilable world view differences, but like the other good soldiers, declined to criticize his boss.

That was before Trump called him ‘the world’s most over-rated general’ while trying to defend his precipitous withdrawal from Syria, leaving the Kurds to a certain slaughter. Most soldiers, Mattis included, would bristle over a cut-and-run like this, an act of cowardice that even the Republicans found repugnant, not to mention a complete lack of foreign policy by this administration that leaves in its wake head-spinning implications for the Middle East.

“I earned my spurs on the battlefield,” the General said at a gala fundraiser, “… and Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor.” Later he added a few further commentaries. “I think the only person in the military that Mr. Trump doesn’t think is overrated is Colonel Sanders.” And if that wasn’t enough, he added, “A year, according to White House time, is about 9,000 hours of ‘executive time,’ or 1,800 holes of golf.” Well played, General, well played.

So it has come to this, the Commander-in-Chief ridiculed by his own generals. And the question that should be asked of the folks who support the President in light of such open mockery, how much more can we take, how much damage can we sustain, how long before we say enough is more than enough? Judging by the response to the impeachment hearings, I’d say his defenders are willing to become the laughingstock of the world. The trouble is, there’s not much funny here.