I handed off the remote to the flatscreen shortly after 0900 to enable more stimulating programming. Not that this isn’t. I mean, this is like far out. The witnesses who are testifying at the big hearing were still showing up, and the seats of the Members were still unoccupied. Since the guys coming up to testify this morning have already done so, in the double-secret hearings already held in the little Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in the basement of the Capitol.

I am content to let the skilled media professionals to edit the hours of today’s testimony down to a few sound-bytes I can digest with the evening ranch beans. I am not the only one who is getting a bit restive- this non-stop bombshell carpet-bombing is quite exhausting for those paying attention. Many are not, of course.

My pal Ollie and his lovely bride live in one of those cool academic towns in the Midwest. They are alert. They feel the lines have been drawn. He wrote me this morning:

“I just read that the Bars are opening early today in DC, as the town is in a frenzy of excitement……The outsider President, pretender really, (a bullying, impolite, boorish bigoted slob, voted in by an unruly uneducated mob of mid America rural gun-toting rubes and bumpkins) being run out of town on a rail? Thank God order and honesty and decency about to be reestablished by our maligned beleaguered professional DC Bureaucracy! The lines are drawn!”

I am always torn by my loyalty to the faceless but critical bureaucrats make this overly complex system totter along. I was one of them. Still, the ground rules seem to have changed since I have been gone. Ollie wasn’t done though. He concluded his note with this:

“It’s big-time DC events like this that make your readers, like me, yearn for the days of The Willow. Would the Johns, with and without the H, be on opposite sides of this one? Where would all those lovely barmaids stand or preferably sit?”

Down in the country, first no-shit cold day, record low temperatures all over, It gave me a warm glow to think back on the best pirate crew in Arlington at the magnificent Willow Bar. I don’t remember a great deal about that decade, but I am confident we got through worse than this.

Copyright 2019 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com