It’s just about time to say goodbye, I guess. But I’m not sorry. I’m really looking forward to the day, and I’m sure everyone else is as well. In fact, it can’t come soon enough.
This endless election season is nearly over, and my mailboxes – both the one by the road and the one nestled on the computer – are about to get a whole lot (figuratively in case of the email box) lighter.
Goodbye, Elizabeth Warren. I know I owe you a lot for ending Scott Brown’s Senate career, but you don’t have to write me daily touting your new BFF – Hillary Clinton – and offering me a list of candidates from around the country I should send my spare change to. In fact, I think I already hear from many of them. And I don’t have a lot of spare change.
Adios, too, to a couple of irrepressible hombres who’ve lately shown up in my private cyberspace. I mean, of course, the Trump brothers, Eric and Donald Jr., who – if I may speak frankly to you – present yourselves as just a bit creepy, even in email. The Brylcreem era is dead, boys, or sure ought to be. Why do you want to douse yourselves with an emulsion of water and mineral oil held together with beeswax? Sounds like a slightly sticky furniture polish. Looks like one, too.
And, by the way, why do the two of you keep palling around with white supremacists? Did Ivanka get the only brain in the family?
Yo, Frank Guinta! I’m hoping New Hampshire will be rid of you altogether after Election Day, but even if the 1st CD voters inexplicably decline to dump you, with luck you’ll still be out of my email box. Still not sure how you ever got there. I do have virus protection.
And listen, you folks at GOPUSA Eagle and your partner in peddling alarm, the Political Insider. I’ve about had it with your hair-raising predictions, which arrive with numbing regularity. They all used to be dire warnings about Barack Obama. “This news will DESTROY OBAMA!” “Obama EXPOSED!” “It’s the END of Obama!”
Lately, though, you seem to forget the president – well, he’s on his way out – and are newly fixated on Hillary Clinton. “Indictment in Hillary case is COMING!” You people are NEVER right. Go away!
Oh, I mustn’t forget to mention the indefatigable Julie McClain. She’s apparently a one-woman town crier when it comes to Hillary Clinton’s activities in the Granite State, plus she was a prodigiously productive fact-checker during the three presidential debates, shooting her observations (essentially, variations on “Trump lies!”) into cyberspace at a rapid clip. But I never took a speed-reading course. Besides, I couldn’t very well read Julie’s no doubt excellently checked facts and, you know, actually watch the debates. So, I deleted them.
Sorry, Julie. Now take a vacation.
There are so many more new friends in my email box – Nina Turner, Victor Reyes, Anna Galland, Jack Shapiro, Gabriela Andrade, some guy named Marc and another calling himself Zeke. I’ve appreciated all their attention, and I fully trust that by Wednesday they will be blessedly gone.
The old mailbox by the road has seen its own popularity soar, and every visit by the postman brings a multitude of oversize full-color ads on glossy poster board, and every one sought to persuade us that any number of candidates are faithless, cowardly tools of the Koch brothers or unions or the gun lobby or some other nefarious outfit. A surprising number came from one office in a building at 1747 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., including one warning me (here in the Granite State) that one particular state office holder is a “D.C. insider,” which is pretty funny when you think about it.
I expect that by Wednesday the deluge will have ceased, making our mailman’s job less stressful. Those glossy and slippery placards probably slide all over the mail truck.
Oh, those TV ads we’ve been pounded with will also, presumably, go bye-bye, and good riddance. I will confess that because we record everything we watch, we never actually watch any of the ads. But as we zip through the recording with our trusty remote, we can tell what they are. Uh oh, a blurry and sour-looking Kelly Ayotte! Must be a Maggie Hassan ad. Oops, now it’s a shot of a blurry, shifty-looking Maggie. Kelly – and her super PACs – strike back!
But even the flushest campaigns don’t fritter their money away on post-election ads, so the sound waves should be blessedly tranquil.
Finally, whether he wins or loses, I trust Donald Trump will remove his offensive self from my email. And no, Donald, I will not send you $49 to list my name on the “TRUMP Donor Wall” to be installed at the fabled Trump Tower. Even if it will be a lovely wall, perhaps a Great Wall. And you say I should “act fast” because “space is LIMITED” and you can “only fit 2,000 more names” on it.
But, Donald, that is exactly what you told me in another email last week. You still have room for 2,000 more names? Is nobody buying, er, donating? Or – an awful thought just struck me – is this yet another con, a la Trump “University”? Would I put myself among the painters, marble and glass installers, piano dealers, architects, even lawyers you have cheated in the past? Even now one of your pollsters is crying foul, saying you refuse to pay him more than $600,000 for work done just this summer.
I’d say you sound like a chiseler, Donald. I think I’ll keep my 49 bucks and put it toward a nice turkey dinner in a few weeks.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)
