The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Rudy Giuliani, the former federal prosecutor and mayor of New Yawk on 9-11, is currently (as of the last few hours) Donald Trump’s newest attorney. The man has a mouth like Montezuma’s Revenge and if he had any clue how to use it, he might be dangerous. The President may have found the perfect counselor, a mouthpiece to match his own, full of sound and fury, signifying … well, who knows. He’s been walking back his first statements, then his second and now his last and in the end, it’s exactly like his boss, bad craziness, lies and bombast, ignorance and narcissism full throated. Try, if you can, to avert your eyes, much less your ears.

Trump just hired the guy who was Clinton’s attorney when he was impeached. Tell you something? I can’t remember his name right off, but then, why bother keeping track, they come and go faster than Trump’s girlfriends. Rudy was brought in to clean up the whole witch hunt bizness and so far has pretty much hung a tire around Donald’s neck, mentioning how he knew Cohen was paying off Stormy, how he met with Cohen to make payments when Cohen complained he was getting stiffed, how the payments were necessary given the election was a week away. If Trump was worried Cohen would sing like a canary, he doesn’t have to wonder about his boy Rudy, the man is a bad opera.

Giuliani’s newest fallback is that he doesn’t have the facts yet. Just blabbing off the top of his head, I guess. Like I said, a perfect match for his master. Attorneys usually are conservative fellows, reluctant to say more than what is necessary, usually nothing much at all unless they’re under oath themselves. Whatever lawyer/client privileges might have been invoked down the road, Rudy has pretty much burned that argument by spilling his guts day in and day out.

If I wanted to drain the swamp there in D.C., I might start with a lot less lawyers and lobbyists. Trump, not so much. This guy can take credit, almost single-handedly, for bringing the unemployment numbers down, creating jobs at an incredible pace and hiring folks most people would consider unemployable. Give him credit where credit is due. I just wish I’d gotten a law degree.

These are hard times for the 1% … even though they have control of most of the state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court and the office of the President. Oh sure, they pass tax reform bills that mostly go to themselves, but, and here’s the Rub, some of it went to the undeserving poor and middle class. They classified corporations as people so all that money that used to be given to the lobbying efforts can now go to elections. With a little luck and a lot of loot, they should soon be able to save billions on lobbyists that are no longer needed. You might think these are the Golden Years for the rich.

But you’d be wrong. The rich are never really happy apparently. Like John Paul Getty once answered when asked how much money he could possibly need: More. Succinct and honest. He wants more. He and many of the richest folks in America want it all. How much is enough? More. And trust me, that includes yours.

So when Father Patrick Conroy, the congressional chaplain, inserted a line in his prayer for the legislators to consider the poor in their deliberations, to be fair and inclusive, well … he definitely crossed a Line. Imagine the nerve of this guy!! Speaker Paul Ryan said, just before firing his chaplain, he had brought politics into his prayers. Sorta like that guy Jesus who told folks to sell their riches and give it to the needy. Politics! I guess if you think you ought to have the whole enchilada, giving crumbs to the poor is extremely political.

The thing is, though, they can take umbrage over someone like Padre Conroy inserting charity and hope into his mini-sermon, but they shouldn’t show it publicly. Looks bad. Greed and insensitivity, even in this Trumpian Era, don’t actually play well. They need to feign concern for the poor and downtrodden while they’re picking their pockets. Otherwise they look like, well, avaricious legal thieves. They should offer them a paltry cut in their taxes that they can always recoup with user fees, gas taxes, etc. while taking the lion’s share and claiming they cut taxes for everyone. Let the preacher have his sappy exhortation for charity. They’ll be slicing Medicaid back a few notches and cutting back on welfare programs before he can say Amen.

Sure, they walked it back on the chaplain’s dismissal. But not before they’d drawn back the curtain on their smoke-filled room where the Wizard was discovered to be all those back-slapping, cigar smoking, brandy sniffing yahoos and their lobbyist cronies. Just like you always suspected….

Say a prayer for them. They need saving.

Since it’s a rainy day and I haven’t quite motivated from the morning’s lethargy, let’s rehash the day’s headlines, maybe find reasons to fire up while the coffee is percolating through my sluggish pathways. That arsonist kid blew himself up down in Austin. Good news there. Donald Trump brags he could beat old Joe Biden to a pulp in a fistfight. Nice to know our president has the Putin-esque mentality of a 10 year old punk. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he takes full responsibility for the Borg’s lack of data security. Course, he crossed his fingers. That fully automatic car that killed a woman on the side of the road had a human aboard who didn’t see her either. It happens. Jarod Kushner lied about rent controlled housing numbers to New York City in order to increase profits. No kidding? Putin won by a landslide in jolly olde Russia. Really?….

The Bomb Kid managed to blow up 5 bombs before the Authorities tracked him down. You might have been wondering, like me, how many people he would kill before the ATF, the FBI, the local police, the Texas Rangers and who knows how many other crimefighters pooled their vast resources to bring this nutcase to ground. And maybe, like me, you were stunned how quick they nailed him. Cameras at FedEx, cellphone pings, credit card information, security video at Home Depot, license plate on his vehicle … the boy didn’t get very far. We live in an extremely interconnected world of sticky digital webs. You want to go off the grid, good luck. Ted Kaczysnki slunk off to a cabin. The Barefoot Bandit never used a cellphone or a credit card. No cars. No vehicle licenses. No known addresses.

The rest of us, good luck if you want to be Anonymous. If you want to be Left Alone. If you want to be Individual. Mark Zuckerberg will tell you these are Thought Crimes. What have you got to hide??? Individualism is Anti-Social. The Collective is Happiness. ‘Friends’ are your Salvation. Your Cellphone is God. Information will set you Free!

I try to be optimistic in these strange times we live in, but hellfire, the news coming in at me feels more like shrapnel or those nails the Bomb Kid packed into his explosives. I don’t exactly feel like an innocent bystander, though, since I keep peeking at the headlines. Maybe the trick is to wean off, slowly at first, then, once the D.T. ‘s subside, turn off the computer. Just watch out for the self-driving car that could smack you by the mailbox!!!

Grab a broom, y’all. We’re going witch hunting. I know, doesn’t seem sporting, doesn’t seem fair, the prey are such easy targets. They’ve laid down a trail a blind turkey hunter could follow in the rain. Tax records, graft, payoffs, porn star affairs, lies and misdemeanors, felonies and blatant nepotism, election tampering, bullying, name-calling just follow the latest tweet, you pretty much got the witch treed. That howling you hear isn’t the coon hounds baying, it’s the witch his screaming self. ‘Who would have thought that some little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness.’

These are dark times in Trump Tower, its gold logo looking smoke damaged and tilted. The T is falling off, leaving rump Tower as ironic icon. The hunter has become the prey, his attorneys are lawyering up like madmen, and the greasy little Giuliani has finally weaseled himself into the inner sanctum where men are chewed up and spit out faster than an Oscar Mayer wiener. Even the True Sycophants become sausage in a matter of weeks, sometimes days. Loyalty is a bad joke, it’s All for One and One for One. The rest, they’ll have a snarky nickname shortly.

The center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The evangelicals may like this guy just for the reason that he may be the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. There are plenty of folks who pray for Apocalypse, plenty who secretly want the pandemic or the Big One, lots of folks who see the End Times and rejoice. The Anti-Christ, they may be hoping in their dark hollow hearts, the One who brings Chaos to the world. Drain the Swamp! Pull down the Walls! A better day is Coming.

But there will be no Second Coming this go around. We will be having an exorcism, a witch trial, a great national cleansing, count on that. You want End Times, you’ll have to wait a little longer in your miserable sanctimony. This isn’t the One prophesied in Revelations, kids, this is the wicked witch of the west. The bucket of water is being readied, the monkey army of Republicans will cheer when it’s thrown and the witch is melted, we’ll all go back to the old partisan politics. History will sort this out later, plenty of new jobs there. But we will be rid of the Reign of Terror that will be Trump’s final legacy. Ding dong, the witch will be dead.