The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the docks beside the marina’s Pilot Lounge a few fishing boats were puttering back in after a long day of fishing, mostly without much luck. The boyz hauled their AlumaCrafts and C-Dory’s up onto their trailers and hauled them into the parking lot before joining us layabouts in the Lounge for a few bottle bass before going home to the mizzus empty handed and empty headed. Just another Sunday on the South End….

Well, not quite. Mueller’s report had hit the press Friday and Attorney General Barr had just released a 4 page summary which was the News Flash between the college basketball games on the Lounge’s big screen TV in the back. Big Walter was pounding a table when the crawler read: No Evidence of Trump Collusion with the Russians. Jerry’s glass spilled ale onto the formica table top and Freddie grabbed a handful of napkins to capture the foamy mess before it reached his lap. “Aw, for cripe sakes, Walt,” he yowled, but Big Walter was hollering in full vindication. “Witch hunt, witch hunt, nothing but a damn witch hunt, what I been saying for two years!!”

Two Toke had moved his own glass off the soaked pulpit and removed himself to an adjoining table out of range from the Richter rumblings but not Walter’s booming exultations. “I wouldn’t crow too soon, Walt,” he cautioned, carefully sipping his salvaged beer. “You won’t see your boy impeached, looks like, but don’t figure he’s off the hook.” A couple tables over a foursome of sports pointed to the next crawler under the Washington – North Carolina game: No Exoneration on Obstruction of Justice … and started a mild cheer, clicking glasses and high fiving one another. Two Toke smirked and raised his glass to Walter who kept repeating No Collusion No Collusion.

No Exoneration. No Collusion. The Lounge began to take sides, some stood up, others shook their fists, the new fishermen entering through the front door must have thought a brawl was about to start. They looked hesitant to enter, but Harold, the weekend bartender snapped off the ballgame with a remote held in his hand like a gun and the joint instantly became quiet. “Let’s have some order here, gentlemen,” he demanded, pointing his weapon in Walter’s general direction, “or we’ll have no ballgame. This is a drinking establishment, not a debating society!”

Of course we could have debated that premise as well, but the boyz, chastened by Harold’s edict, settled down meekly and the TV snapped back on. No Collusion, No Exoneration, the crawler scrolled beneath the fourth quarter game. Two Toke took a heavy draw on his glass and said, loud enough for everyone in the place to hear, “No conclusion either.” I parked next to TT and ordered another round for both of us. “Two more,” I said to Harold. “Beers or years?” he asked. “Both,” I replied sadly, “both”.

‘The kettle is black’, said the pot accusingly.

“It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side.’ Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows……” POTUS. See? Even Donald has had enough. And where is the investigation into Hillary and the Russians? Where are those investigations about SNL colluding with the Democrats? How about Benghazi?? Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi. Why did we quit investigating Benghazi???

Those damn commies writing for NBC, they think they can get away with undermining American confidence in their president week after week by satirizing everything he says, everything he stands for, everything he tweets. Writers? C’mon, Donald writes the script nearly verbatim for them. They shouldn’t be paid, they should be locked up as subversives, same as Colbert, same as Noah Trevor, same as most of those left-leaning smug comedians and their sneering Hollywood pals.

The secret to a good Presidency is to attack when attacked. Sure, that article came out last week in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer, pretty much connecting Fox News with this administration in damning detail, so rather than make a spirited defense, take a spirited offense. Find a scapegoat, spin the news, punch somebody in the face. Roy Cohn taught him well. The ghost of Eugene McCarthy is smiling from the gates of Hell every tweet. Great student, Trump!

This morning he went after Saturday Night Live AND John McCain. When the going gets tough, double down, two punches are always better than one. Now McCain is the one who needs to be investigated. McCain was no hero; in fact, he might have been a traitor, the guy who gave that Steele report to the Enemy. You need to sink pretty low to punch a man in the face who’s already down in the grave. But low has become the new standard the past few years. Never apologize, never admit to wrongdoing, blame the press, blame the dead, blame the lady in the porn star dress.

‘The pot is black’, said the kettle, defending itself. Meanwhile the stew is burning.

Light the candles, haul out the cake, open the presents! The Web is 30 years old. Remember when we all thought this would free the oppressed, topple authoritarian regimes, democratize information and liberate us all? Barely ten years later Google opened up shop and every bit and byte of data was available to anyone who owned a computer at the touch of a keystroke. Nine years after Google the I-phone made computers mobile and Apple rich. This was 2007, a mere 12 years ago. Time flies when you’re revolutionizing the world!

Thirty years. You probably remember the first personal computer you owned. Not that long ago. They were introduced in 1975. The mizzus had one probably about 1985. I got one about turn of the century. The one I’m using now is probably the 4th generation. Karen’s is probably double that. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her and a friend, arguing whether a computer was just a tool or whether it was a revolution. That conversation has morphed into whether the revolution is beneficial or malevolent. Future Shock is behind us now. Future Fear is here.

The Tech magnates rule the world. They own the data for every keystroke you make on the internet, every purchase you make online, every biographical reveal you put up on Facebook, every route you take, every step you make. They analyze it, they use it, they sell it, they watch you day and night. Zuckerberg believes in an open society, one without secrets, one where you cannot hide. He made it so.

The democratization of information turned out to be only half the story. The dissemination of false news is the other half. Turns out we don’t have the wits to check our facts so we’re suckers for every hate monger, political dirty trickster, government intrusion, crooked scammer and the 500 pound kid on the bed in his parents’ basement. We mumble about monitoring Facebook or Google, we pound our chest about loss of privacy, we make speeches in the legislatures about clamping Pandora’s Box partway down. Give me a break.

The genie is out of the box and howling now. Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner. We can no longer imagine the world before the Web any more than we could imagine one before the steam engine. No one pines for the horse drawn carriage, no one wants to be tethered to a land line phone, no one wants to live without their Facebook friends. I had a fire down at my electrical panel box yesterday and my neighbor, the one I’d run across the road to have call the fire department, seemed to gloat when he asked me after the fire had been put out, if I still thought I was smart not owning a cellphone. I told him there was no way I was buying a $#@&^ cellphone. It doesn’t make me smart, but I’m digging some heels against the winds that blow me toward a future I don’t trust any more.

Brain Flu Pandemic (You Can Fool Half of the People All of the Time)

The latest polls that came out this week show that for the first time most Americans think the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt, more than those who don’t by 4 percentage points. This is after a dozen indictments of associates, some already convicted, some of the others pleading guilty, plus the President’s personal attorney testifying that he’s a crook, a fraud, a womanizer and worse.

It would be easy to blame Fox News and Breitbart. Easy to blame the Russian bots. Easy to blame Facebook. But … what I think we got here is some kind of bio-engineered flu that short circuits the cognitive paths of the human brain. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense. So it must be true. All of you who took the brain flu shot and avoided the malady must be thinking: how is this possible? How is that over 50% of my fellow Americans have decided that the investigation into collusion with the Russians is nothing but a witch hunt? When day after day another link pops up implicating the Trumps, all of them, with inappropriate contacts with Russians, all hoping to get their greedy little fingers into that borsht called the Trump Tower Moscow. They and their operatives have repeatedly lied about meetings with the Moscovites, some are now in jail even. But the investigation is a witch hunt???

Add to that the obvious attempt to impede, interfere with and obstruct the investigation. Trump fired Comey and bragged to the Russians that he’d taken care of that little ‘problem’. He raged at Sessions, hammered Rosenstein, dictated false accounts for his son, aw, on and on, it just becomes obvious to any but the brain flu impaired. Does this add up to impeachment? Will that man go to jail? Let’s skip that for now. It does add up to more than mild proof that the Mueller investigation has got its witches lined up. Whether we drown them in the pond or burn them at the stake, that’s coming later.

They say a country gets the Leader it deserves. I guess if the brain flu has destroyed the minds of most of the nation, they must deserve a Leader whose own brain is defective. But it doesn’t seem fair, does it? I mean, it has to be some sort of disease, maybe a bio-attack by those pesky Chinese or those idolatrous Moslems, turning us into virulent viral emailers, alt-right enthusiasts and white supremacists. They’ve even turned the religious into fanatic haters. It’s like a political rabies, horrible, maybe irreversible.

Short of a vaccine to protect the 48% who still have frontal lobe activity, the truth is that a majority of us citizens now don’t really care what crimes Trump may have committed. They’re not going to fire him, they wouldn’t care if he shoots a few folks on 5th Avenue with an automatic assault rifle. Probably immigrants anyway. Rapists, drug peddlers, gang members. Good riddance. Fascism has come to the Land of the Free. More than Trump are guilty of obstruction of justice.