The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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In the smoking debris of the Republican Red Wave the pundits are weighing in on what went wrong.  No doubt a few die hard MAGA’s will assume that the election was rigged, probably Venezuelan software in the Dominion voting machines, but most of the autopsies seem to be looking for a villain among their own.  Trump.  The candidates he backed, ranging from the football hero to the quack TV doctor, just weren’t of a high enough quality, they say.

Ya think?  C’mon, folks, take a stroll through the past few years and tell me the GOP candidates were top drawer.  Consider just the folks who won, mostly old white angry men, guys like McCarthy who on Jan. 6^th said his president was unfit for office — ya think, again?— but was on a plane to Mar-a-Lago 22 days later to kiss the ring.  How many of these quality Republicans holding office refused to confirm Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 race?

To quote the bard, referring as easily to Donald Trump as Julius Caesar:

‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

Let’s be honest here.  You proved you can fool some of the people all of the time.  The real truth is you fooled yourselves.  If you’re looking for a scapegoat, try a mirror.

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If you were dreading another two years of the interminable election cycle, probably canceling your newspapers and substituting subscriptions to entertainment channels, plugging your ears and avoiding MSNBC and maybe waiting  til the dust clears in 2024 before pulling the quilts down from over your head and leaving your bed … well, you got some good news.  Trump plans to tip the checkerboard for the Republicans, the House is going to divide up sides for some serious tag team no-holds-barred smackdown wrestling, and you can expect some cliff hanger serials with plenty of violence and mayhem to get you through those lonely nights coming up.  Trump is running again and you best believe the Republicans are going to war with themselves.

I guess if you honestly believe Trump won the last election, well, hell, run him again.  Just make sure the voting machines aren’t cooked, the dead aren’t voting,  the ballots aren’t stuffed, the mail-ins are banned, the gerrymandering continues, the lines in the inner cities are long and the polling places few.  Just to get the ball rolling, the President-in-Exile announced from his palace in Mar-a-Lago that the new slogan for his campaign will be — cue the trumpets— Make America Great and Glorious Again.  I guess that first term of his didn’t really make the cut.  Maybe hold off on the Glorious and get the Great accomplished.  Or … I don’t know, triple down and Make America Great and Glorious and Glamorous Again.  Just need a bigger ballcap to read MAGAGAG.  Costs slightly more, all proceeds going to the Trump charity.

Down in Florida they must be drinking the swamp water, all I can figure.  DeSantis runs ads that on the 8^th Day the Lord made a warrior.  Him.  Not to be outdone, Trump wants a glorious second coming, another Rome with him as Caesar.  Must be some biblical prophecy needing fulfilled for these guys.  If the Lord is working overtime now, adding days to Her week to get the job done, maybe it’s time to take a rest.

You were probably thinking you deserve a rest.  Sorry, looks like a long slog from here to election day 2024.  Like they say, it ain’t over til the Fatboy squeals.  Or something like that.  Might be a fine time to read some good books.

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Now the mizzus was a sort of mail order bride.  I came out to the rainforests here in the 70’s, bought my 7 acres and my mule just before the interest rates went wild and discovered how few single ladies there were in the woods of the South End.

So I resorted to what our pioneer ancestors turned to … no,  not THAT … I wrote back to the Midwest for a wife.  I had a lady friend in Minnysota who was just fixing to graduate with her masters degree in librarying.  Librarying, I thought to myself, is even better’n school ma’arm.  She could teach some of the artists on the South End here how to read and write and then we could sit around the porch and discuss Nietzsche and Tolstoy, the events of the day.

Late spring of l981 I commenced to writing heart wrenching, bodice ripping, pulse pounding love letters.  I told my darling all about our little island, how it was a tropical paradise where our beautiful cottage nestled in the arms of million year old cedar trees and coconut palms and you could see the Olympic Mountains every night at sunset glowing like a fireplace and that old sun had nothing on the lovelight in my heart for her …

Course she didn’t have a chance….  Who could resist my literary charms?  And I’m sure she carried a picture of my irresistible self in a locket in her bosom, pining – PINING, ladies and gentlemen – for that day a letter would arrive from her Prince Charming, old lumber Jack himself, king of Camano, practically Paul Bunyan with a book of poems under his ax arm.

Well, I was surprised TOO she didn’t rush out to my waiting muscle bound arms.  So I wrote some more.  I wrote a dictionary worth.  Then I wrote an encyclopedia Britannica.  Spring turned to summer, summer turned to fall, fall became winter, my dreams turned to mush.  I run outa words.  ME!  With nothing left to say.  I was about to give up and become a Zen hermit priest.

But one day I got a letter saying she was coming OUT.   …  For a day or two, then going to Alaska to see her cousin.  Alaska?  Why on god’s green earth would she go to a godforsaken hellhole like that when she could have the whole South End paradise?

Course she was gonna see the cottage wasn’t a cottage – it was a shack.  Leaky roof, crooked floors, a ladder to the upstairs.  Alaska was gonna look REAL good.  And Prince Charming?  I was in serious trouble now.

But luck was on my side.  The day she flew in a storm took out a dozen trees to the South End and power was out when we pulled in the drive.  So I lit up the oil lamps and popped the champagne and boiled the crabs on the woodstove and I won’t tell you the details but let your romantic imagination run wild and you might have some small notion of why the mizzus is still the mizzus and why we both still celebrate the day she came out here and not our wedding anniversary and why the South End will always be a tropical paradise to at least a couple of us old lovebirds.

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Well okay, that Big Red Wave for the Republicans came in with a little less than what they’d hoped for, no doubt figuring Sleepy Joe’s age and world inflation would be all they’d need for a wipeout victory.  Maybe total negativity isn’t the best message for the voters.  But what are ya gonna do?  After all, tax cuts for the rich probably aren’t going to slow down inflation.  When bread prices go through the roof, telling em to eat cake won’t fly either.

Where we sit right now, the Senate is a toss-up.  If Nevada drops in the Dem category, game over.  If it flips red, we got ourselves another Georgia finish.  A reverend vs. a football hero.  Tough choice down there in the Peach State.  Herschel is carrying a lot of baggage, even for a big running back.  Doesn’t like abortions but paid for two of his out-of-wedlock sweethearts to have one.  Then lied about it.  Claims we can push that bad Chinese air back where it came from and solve pollution woes.  Asks why we want any more trees.

You probably don’t expect football stars to be Rhodes scholars too, but maybe they should be smarter than this guy.  And maybe morality should count too.  Especially if you’re the party of family values.  The hair on fire boyz are rallying like dumpy old cheerleaders for Walker, exhorting the crackers to get their redneck asses out to vote, the fate of America is on the scrimmage line.  Me, I think this is the ultimate irony for the GOP.  A candidate with no solutions, no real ideas, no telling how he got to be the spotlight for the entire country to parse and analyze.  I wouldn’t want to be Herschel right now, no way.

And if I thought bozos like Lindsay Graham or Newt Gingrich were going to save the day, maybe block those 300 pound gorillas on the front line, holy pigskin, Fatman, I’d be wishing I was back with a couple of my sweethearts, promising to use protection this time.  But you never know in the Yew Ess Aye these happy days what the ending to this election might be.  Walker is Trump’s pick and so I expect he’ll have to go up to Georgia, give his usual stump pitch whether the Republicans like it or not.  Poor Herschel, damned if Trump does, damned if he doesn’t.  Why can’t life be as simple as football?

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