To: The Treasonous Chicken

No one wants to lose a game of “chicken,” but I think the deal is that if you don’t want to lose such games, you really shouldn’t initiate them. Now that you’ve lost a very public, very consequential game of chicken it’s clear you’re trying to spin having signed the relief bill into some sort of Trumpian triumph even though you got none of the changes you were DEMANDING – not a one, nada, zilch, the big goosey chicken egg. Your lamest of lame face saving effort apparently amounts to having sent a “red lined copy” of the bill back to the Republicans with the idea that they’ll jump right on making those changes you want, even though they’ve agreed to no such thing and clearly don’t have to do anything because…. – you signed the damn bill. You seem to have missed all of the remedial “how to President” lessons that most kindergartners are hip to.

Ok, so why’d you do it? Who promised you (or threatened) what? It must have been really good (or really bad), whatever it was. And do you have your Foxy Friends lined up with some top-notch gaslighting designed to make your base believe that you swooped in at the last nanosecond and saved the country from utter destruction? If I could stomach watching the Fox talk show hosts and the Fox news anchors it would probably be kind of fun to see how the two sides handle this doozy of a belly flop.

Well, it is a relief that you signed the darn bill and that desperate people are going to get at least some aid, even if they are losing out on a week, which could have been avoided had you signed the darn bill yesterday. What the f*ck is wrong with you? Rhetorical question. We don’t have from now to eternity to answer it.

I spent much of the day in worry and wait mode, wondering whether you’d make good on your threat not to sign the bill. I couldn’t muster enough focus to do much of anything so I read random things in both the WP and the HP, did a few small chores around the house, finished knitting a fingerless glove I found that I’d partially completed a couple of years ago, picked up trash up and down the block, and generally fretted.

The one semi-interesting (to me) thing that I did was to look to see who holds the Guinness World Record for having written the most letters. I’m not sure if I found the only relevant entry, but the most obvious one is for “most letters written” and it’s held by Uichi Noda, who’s the former Vice Minister of Treasury and Minister of Construction in Japan. He wrote 1,307 letters to his invalid wife, Mitsu, when he was on overseas trips from July 1961 until she died in March 1985. I’m imagining that he told her all about his travels – what he was seeing, who he was meeting, the strange foods he was eating – so that she could feel like she was (almost) there with him. I hope it was something like that.

I’m pretty surprised and kind of bummed, though, that the number isn’t a lot larger since as of today I’ve written to you 1,409 days in a row. The fact that I’ve passed Mr. Noda (and crammed them into less than four years) means I’m probably going to obsess over whether to submit an application to GWR – seems like I should get something out of this deal other than just my sanity. Well, we’ll see.

May we be safe from treasonous leaders who treat us like pawns.
May we be willing to not cut them any slack, whatsoever.
May we be strong for one another.
May we accept that we still have 24 more days to go with a maniac on the loose.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson