The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We just got home from a wee vacation down at the Columbia River Gorge where we met up with old friends to hike and reminisce. We rented an old log cabin built by some biker dude who used to drive his Harley up to the location where Mt. Hood was perfectly framed beyond the orchards that dot the valley. From the antiques to the old photos on the walls, the place was like going back a century to a less complicated era. Mostly it was a respite from newspapers and politics and the impeachment hearings. To say it was a much needed tonic from those would be an understatement and a half.

But we’re back now, catching up on all things Trump and the ongoing impeachment investigation. It feels like my friend who returned from Nepal to find that returning home was more like PTSD, a head-jarring culture shock of consumer overdose and information overload. I mean, how many cereals do we possibly need glutting up an aisle or two in every grocery store from Miami to Seattle? Forget about the fact that most of them are diabetes-inducing processed crap marketed to kids who will be addicted to sugar before preschool. We want more choices, not less. We want more Trump, not less. We want our politics to be entertaining, not informative.

When we left less than a week ago, Trump and his apologists were bitching about ‘the process’, same one they used on Hillary with Benghazi, hypocrisy be damned! When the folks being interrogated testified that a quid pro quo existed between Trump and the Ukrainians, they argued at first that these people weren’t in the room, weren’t on the phone call, weren’t reliable witnesses, weren’t loyal, might even be spies and traitors. They screamed bloody murder that not every Republican Senator and Representative could be at the hearings, totally unfair, totally undemocratic. Everybody and their brother has been ordered by the White House to ignore subpoenas to appear before this witch hunt, but a few have defied that and testified anyway, probably to save their reputations and their hides. Now that transcripts are being released and testimony is under oath, well yeah, there was a quid pro quo to get dirt on Biden’s boy and find a secret server in Ukraine under a bed maybe in a farmhouse possibly outside Kiev in exchange for Congressionally mandated millions for a military fighting the Russians, they argue that if it was true, so what? Get over it, it’s done all the time, it’s how we do business.

Turns out Giuliani and Rick Perry were running an undercover State Department to get this done. You don’t hear from Rudy these days and Rick is stepping down from his cabinet post but not, he assures us, because it has anything to do with this Ukraine mess. The new line from the apologists is that okay, so it was quid and pro and quo too, it’s hardly an impeachable offense. Maybe looks bad, might even be the wrong thing to do, but not criminal, not illegal and certainly not impeachable.

The chickens are home too, to roost. The arguments from the apologists get wilder and wilder, the corner they’ve painted themselves into gets smaller and smaller. Their reasonings make as much sense as a box of Count Chocula, no nutrition, just empty calories. They’ll be adding a prize in every box soon, the way they used to when I was a naïve kid growing up in an America I thought I didn’t recognize any more. But it’s the same old con, the same old snake oil, the same old shell game. We’ve always had Trump, we just never put him in charge before.

Hits: 24