The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe by now you’ve canceled your subscription to the lying New York Times, turned off the radio that has NPR, switched from PBS to Comedy Central and erected a chain link fence around your property and put security locks on all your doors. If so, stop reading right now, no need to disturb your attempted disengagement from all things Trump.

Today the man demanded the NY Times apologize profusely to him for allowing Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman to call him the enemy of the people. He’s incensed, he’s steaming mad, he’s outraged. After all, he calls the NY Times the enemy of the people. You get too many enemies of the people and the message gets diluted down to truck stop coffee strength, no caffeine, just the urge to pee. When attacked, strike back twice as hard. File lawsuits, tweet in capitals, revert to name-calling but don’t just sit there waiting for the next shoe to drop. Escalate! Roy Cohn Principal #1.

Get ready for some serious tweeting this next year. Committee after committee will demand tax records, testimony from his staff, subpoenas for his bank records, a constant dribble of illegalities, fraud, criminality, emoluments, nepotism, back-channel communications with Russians, real estate shenanigans, a very long list of what it takes for a president to become the enemy of the people. Impeachment? They don’t need no stinking impeachment with all the investigations they’ll be holding. And if you think Mr. T is outraged now, hold on to your britches. What’s coming will be red hot.

His personal attorney Cohen warned us about this guy. He won’t go gentle into that dark night. He’s not Nixon. He’s not going to see the merit in accepting what will be an avalanche of incriminating details and step off before the poop hits the fan, not Trump, not his way.

And if you stop and think about it, what has he got to gain? Soon as he leaves office, the wolves will have legal access. Maybe you can’t indict a sitting president, but you can sure indict an ex-president. Roy Cohn’s advice isn’t going to help our boy once he’s lost the bully pulpit and there’s no ignoring the subpoenas anymore. The real question is Cohen’s question: will he leave office willingly? Or is something ugly waiting down the road?

A month or so ago I tried to burn down my old house, accidental arson, but to no avail, just scorched some walls and fried the panel box and its antique breaker switches. So now I’ve torn off the interior walls, dismantled the old breaker box and installed a modern one, then reconnected wires and jettisoned even more I don’t need. Just for fun I replaced the old barnwood walls I tore off with a crowbar and replaced them with new cedar and tongue and groove maple flooring.

Now I have to call in a state inspector to certify it was all done according to code. Needless to say, I’m nervous. Not so much about the panel box replacement as the half mile of wires running throughout the shack, up the walls, exposed, illegal, definitely not code. I’m hoping I’m only being inspected on the box, not the entire house. Because of those fears a year ago I decided not to replace the panel. If I had been shut down, we’d lose the power to run the well. It’s one thing to live without electricity in the shop, quite another without water up at the house. This time we ran wire down from the main house to run the well house … so if we’re red-tagged by the inspector we can flush toilets and still make coffee. Small blessings!

I’ve been thinking how much of a miracle it must’ve been when that old shack got its first electricity. Water could be pumped from the 1930’s piston-driven Mayers pump one hundred feet deep directly into the house. There’s an addition on concrete, the only part of the house not on post and beam, that was the indoor bathroom. No more outhouse! They could power a refrigerator like the coil top GE electric one I still have in the freezer room. They could read at night by incandescent bulbs, run a sewing machine, listen to a radio! It must have seemed like a miracle all these things we moderns take for granted, a defining moment, a cause for celebration. I think maybe I’ll know exactly how they felt. If I pass that inspection….

‘Don’t Throw Me In that Briar Patch’
Br’er Rabbit to Br’er Fox

You gotta pity the poor Democrats. The Mueller Report was replete with impeachable offenses and Mueller himself made it clear the ball was now in their court. His job was to investigate, provide facts, serve up indictments, refer to other judicial branches those issues outside his purview but crimes nevertheless. A sitting President, not his job to make the call. What he said was he could not, NOT, offer exoneration on the issue of Obstruction of Justice. That job would fall to the Congress using the powers of impeachment.

Congress, of course, has all the courage of the lion in the Wizard of Oz as it chews on its tail in trepidation. The GOP, as always, is willing to ignore just about anything short of murder to defend their new leader, the guy who has changed the Grand Old Party into the Greedy Obnoxious Partisans with scarcely a whimper from the boys in the club. The Democrats believe what the Republicans are threatening them with: that an impeachment will backfire on them in the 2020 elections. They think it might be better to let that go and fight for a replacement to the Boy King next cycle.

They could be right, of course, and expediency could trump justice here. But the argument against leaning into impeaching a president so utterly lacking in decency or morals is that the case is comparable to Clinton’s, who was impeached, but not convicted in the Senate. The Senate now has made it crystal clear they have no interest in Trump’s malfeasance so long as they can use him for their own goals. Profiles in Courage, not so much. Clinton’s impeachment was seen, ultimately, as partisan over-reach. He said under oath he did not have sex with that woman and most people could understand, if not condone, lying about sexual improprieties.

Trump, on the other hand, refused to testify for Mueller. We all know he lies constantly, possibly doesn’t even know the difference between what is true and what isn’t. We know he and his advisors met multiple times with the Russians, even asked them to find Hillary’s emails. We know why he fired Comey. We know why he asked his attorney to write a letter denying he had asked for Mueller to be fired. We know plenty. We know enough that if Trump were not President, he more than likely would be indicted for obstruction of justice. He may not have conspired with the Russians, but he certainly colluded. Collusion is not a crime. Conspiracy is and it requires coordination between the two parties. Trump mostly wanted a Tower in Moscow. The boob never dreamed he might actually win the election. The goal was that Tower. The rest was prototypically real estate shenanigans.

Mueller will be testifying in a few weeks but nothing much will change. Barr did his utmost to muddy the water. The swamp is growing suburbs out there in DC. And the real victim is government once again. Something stinks in America. Something is rotting. We all know what it is, we just can’t seem to do anything about it. Which brings us to the 2020 election. You won’t be hearing many Democratic candidates leading chants to Lock Him Up, Lock Him Up! We just passed that milestone and now we’re moving into the Next Chapter, just get rid of this angry little Fuhrer and let us put him behind us where historians can dice his legacy into a nasty puree of corruption and greed, small mindedness and self-serving illegitimacy. Trump will get his tower all right, one with no windows and his name in black letters. He will go down in the annals of American History as the worst of the bottom feeders. If there was truly any justice, we would blot his name from every edifice and every consciousness. We would completely and forever forget this sad chapter as, hopefully, a temporary madness.

Now that we can finally put the Mueller Report behind us, proof positive that Trump was right, this was all a Witch Hunt, nothing to see here, no collusion, no obstruction of justice, just Total Exoneration, maybe we can return to more important matters of state. Benghazi, for one. And the Clinton Foundation, #2. And while we’re at it, how about another look at Whitewater?

Attorney General Barr, a paragon of impartiality, pretty much wrapped up this waste of money and time. The poor guy, he said, referring to his boss, was under siege by rabid opponents and of course he felt the need to protect himself and by doing so, his country. That’s why he ousted Comey, why he ordered Mueller fired, why he berated Sessions, nothing to see there but a man protecting his good name. Trump. If ever there was a name meant to be writ large in gold letters, Trump is the name, the brand, the President of the United States.

My English major background no doubt has ruined my capability of reading the report correctly. I could have sworn it was clear that Mueller had no mandate to indict a sitting president, simply make recommendations to Congress which does have the power and the responsibility to investigate those obvious 10 examples of obstruction of justice. Something there between the lines, apparently to the Republican side of the aisle, that I completely missed. Even the part where Donald is quoted, upon hearing Mueller has been given the investigation, that there goes his presidency, he’s fucked. Or, as my news feeds keep quoting, ‘F***d’, so maybe it meant Freed. Or Fake Newsed. See, I jump to conclusions.

Like the one I kept asking myself: what about the Russian interference in the election? Barely before the ink had dried on the redactions on the report, I heard Republicans blaming Obama for that. His watch. His f***k up. Sure he went to McConnell and asked for bipartisan support before stepping into a hot election, didn’t want to seem prejudiced, and McConnell, always the good patriot, turned him down flat. Well, see, I jumped to conclusions again.

So it’s time to put all this behind us, I guess. Nothing incriminating in that report. But hey, where are those deleted emails of Hillary’s??? Something in those, I bet. Something worth investigating. Attorney General Barr, hopefully, will jump on that now that this dust has finally cleared….

And Congress, well, I kind of assumed they might start checking into Russian interference with our elections. Course, now we might as well cancel those. We got the right man in office for these dangerous times… No point pretending anymore we live in some kind of democracy. Once again, jumped to conclusions.

It’s time, apparently, to move the Statue of Liberty to Alcatraz and set up a new Ellis Island on our western shores in the San Francisco harbor. Actually, we won’t be needing an Ellis Island if the President gets his way. A week ago he announced the U.S. was full up, no more room, put up the NO TRESPASSING sign, build the walls, send out a tweet we don’t need no stinking immigrants, at least not those of color. But … hold the presses! This week he’s floating a brand new idea (surprised?) to put all those caravans of rapists and drug dealers and con artists congregated at our southern border and ship them by bus to those liberal bastions of anti-Americanism, the Sanctuary Cities.

Serve em right, these mouthy do-gooders who complain about the Wall and about ICE and about separating kids from parents. Show em who’s boss. See what they say then? Sure, they claim they’d welcome these immigrants, put them to work shoring up their economies, make them hard-working citizens. Oh right, the Prez sez. Okay, bring it on!

Well, sir, I say do it! Take the pressure off those border towns that are being overwhelmed by amnesty seekers with court backlogs extending past the next election cycle. But then you have to shut up about no more room. You have to acknowledge that you never had an immigration policy beyond simply shutting the gate. You have to admit you really don’t mind an open border so long as these migrants go to blue states. Immigration was just red meat, wasn’t it, for the folks who need to blame someone for what went wrong in rural America as we move into a digital future?

Just do it, Mr. Mouth! Send these folks to San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia and Seattle. In a week they can go pretty much wherever they want. Maybe get a name or two, height, weight, date of birth, then adios, amigos! With some luck they’ll spread into the onion fields of Georgia, the cherry orchards of New York, the construction sites of every state in the Union, the garment shops of L.A. Nothing much will change but at least, at the very least, we can look forward to a different topic than the Wall. Might be a good change of pace to go back to Benghazi or the Witch Hunt. A breath of fresh air, maybe not, but at least some consistency. Insanity gets ever so tiresome.