Is this a rotten year, or what?
It’s the Mona Lisa of horrible years. (Her slight smile is for those who expected a normal year.)
It’s the Boone and Crockett world’s largest ten-point bull elk of rotten years.
We think of the coronavirus as the low point of the year, but recall that 2020 started with Jerry Nadler and his colleagues slow-walking articles of impeachment over to the U.S. Senate. In the end, they could only dislodge one Republican vote in the Senate, and that from flip-flopping, now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t Mitt Romney, the recipient of the worst vote I ever cast for president.
Don’t forget that the State of the Union Speech was delayed this year because of a government shutdown sparked by the debt limit (Surprise!). They finally had the speech, but Donald Trump poured salt in liberal wounds by using the occasion to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh.
Here’s a fun thing to try. Those readers who have to prepare an annual budget at work should try telling their boss that instead of a budget this year, you will be submitting a “continuing resolution,” in which you will spend about 30 percent more than you plan to take in. Go ahead. Give it a try. (Old Simpson would have arrived at retirement about 20 years early if he had ever tried that.)
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s response to Trump’s State of the Union Address? She made a big show of tearing up her copy of the speech, something we had never seen before, but which turned out to be par for the course in this impacted wisdom tooth of a year.
(Can’t we all just get along? Uh, no.)
Not long after that we headed for our basements, giving Covid-19 two weeks to play itself out and make sure health care workers had adequate masks and gowns. Two weeks. If only.
And when we ventured out to the grocery store, darned if the toilet paper aisle wasn’t sold out. Now, that’s my idea of threatening. They told us we needed hand sanitizer and masks, but they were sold out, too. Walmart tried to tell us what direction we could go in each aisle (“Don’t shop this way!” the signs said), but ultimately gave up. (I’m not walking an aisle and a half extra for a can of tomato soup, are you?)
Meat, soup, milk, potatoes – all were sold out for a time, and we got a taste of what socialism would be like if we turn things over to this new breed of hair-on-fire Democratic nuts in Congress.
It was almost a relief when we read that “murder hornets” were on the way. At least it was something different to worry about than toilet paper. (And just this week, hairy venomous caterpillars were spotted in Virginia.)
Trump was on TV every afternoon for a while with the scientists, but now Joe Biden tells us he never listened to the scientists. (Pundit Britt Hume put it best: “Which scientists” should he listen to?) Democrats and the media took every opportunity in an evolving crisis to criticize course changes along the way, and we’re told that hard-charging, ball-of-fire Joe Biden would have done much better.
(This just in: The World Health Organization now says lockdowns are not a good thing after all.)
A cop in Minneapolis killed a guy in handcuffs, setting off rioting and looting there, and crowds in Portland, Ore., demonstrated and rioted for the next 100 days. And they’re not done yet. Rioters took over part of Seattle for a while. Venturing downtown, in lots of cities (even Kenosha, Wis.), became questionable.
Covid and the alleged awfulness of our country delayed and crippled baseball, basketball and football, creating hoards of people like me who have sworn off pro sports forever. And we have seen more hurricanes than our alphabet has letters to name.
We still have two months and a bitter, angry, hateful presidential election to go, that could well be tied up in the courts for weeks, if not months.
What more could possibly go wrong?
Don’t ask.
The only good news? A Japanese study showed that something in McDonalds French fries may re-grow hair. That’s it.
Some year.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at davesimpson145@hotmail.com
