Historical September–October 2020 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Hi there Dear Reader, I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and doing well. Heck, I even hope that you and your liked ones are safe and doing well.
These are crazy times. It’s OK to enter a bank while wearing a mask and the rest of the world won’t allow US citizens to visit. I’ve been writing this column for a long time and it’s always been a challenge. Either I don’t know what to say and have to stretch my words or I have too much to say and need to parse them. What’s really sad is that you probably can’t tell the difference. Oh well.
But recent times have made this column particularly difficult.
After all, Hawkeye has used this soapbox to make fun of Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. I’ve been pretty consistent although Bush II certainly gave me much more fodder to fod.
I thought that we’d reached the nadir during his regime; I mean, how could you have a worse president than Mission Accomplished George W. Bush?
When he was considering whether to one-up his father and invade Iraq, Colin Powell cautioned against doing so by saying, “If you break it, you bought it.” Well, we broke it and we’re still buying.
After Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, I thought we could only go up, and we did so by electing Obama.
But then we elected, more or less, Trump. Thank you, Electoral College.
To be fair (and Hawkeye is always fair), we shouldn’t be surprised at the disaster of his presidency.
After all, his experience was a mediocre, multi-bankrupted real estate developer who also was a television reality show host.
He inherited so much money that he never had any kind of a boss, so he never learned to listen. What did we expect?
His leadership, lack thereof, causes me to worry a lot.
The election is months away and while Biden is ahead in every poll, who knows how that will turn out? (That’s assuming we have an election, a topic for another column.) Maybe all of the illegal aliens that Trump thought voted for Clinton last time will now vote for him. Or perhaps the Russian bots will change their party and mail in specious (R) ballots. Stranger things have happened; they did last time! So, pessimist that I am – Hawkeye did, gulp, predict Trump’s election last time – here are some thoughts to prepare yourself for the next four years of President Trump.
The terrain in going to be rough until Senator Tammy Duckworth is elected president in 2024. By then, break it, bought it will apply to us times 2. You will want to be rich so you can benefit from the Republican tax benefits for the wealthy, thus here are Hawkeye’s sure-fire stock tips. 1. Buy stock in Hydroxychloroquine. Sure, on July 1, the Food and Drug Administration wrote “FDA cautions against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems,” but so what?
If it’s good enough for DJT, it’s good enough for me. Besides, it also works on removing empathy. 2. Buy stock in Twitter. Within a year of re-election, Trump and Attorney General Barr will decide to clamp down on Fake News. Yep, that’s any news that Trump doesn’t like so it means all news. Newspapers will be forced to cease publishing and the news will only come to us through Twitter or FOX television.
I neglected to mention that the television networks will all be seized, except FOX, ESPN, and the Cartoon Channel, and the Cartoon Channel isn’t big on news (but then neither is FOX.) 3. Buy stock in sheet metal.
With a four-year headwind and not having to worry about re-election, Trump will force the building of the wall, so miles and miles of sheet metal will be needed. He’ll get the money by cutting back on the budget for the EPA, food stamps (SNAP), and funding for low-income housing.
But relax, the wall is going to be beautiful! 4. Buy stock in military garb.
Some of Trump’s actions have enraged people and that will only increase.
The issues range from his insensitivity to BLM and Covid to extolling the gun-toting parvenues on Portland Place, but for sure we can anticipate more public protests. Yep, that means that General Barr will send in the military pretty frequently and they’ll need lotsa uniforms. Camouflage is the new black, or is it orange? 5. Buy stock in airlines. Right now planes are pretty empty but that will change. At some point within the next year we’ll have a Covid vaccine. Folks won’t be reluctant to get on a plane, and the rest of the world will welcome us.
When that happens there will be a tsunami of people trying to leave the country to go to some place with a better federal government – Venezuela, Syria, Lebanon, North Korea, or China. OK, I hope that my prognostications are wrong. We’re overdue for some good leadership, but just in case, buy some kneepads. We’re going to be doing lots of kneeling.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, September–October 2020.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2020_09.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
