Criminals, criminals, everywhere And none that stopped to think Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Crime of the Ancient Panderer
A friend, out jogging this morning, stopped me in the park and ripped out his ear buds, grinning. “I just heard, and I want you to be the first to know. Guilty on all seven counts!” High fives, and on he went, proud to be the bearer of glad tidings.
Cohen. Manafort. Flynnski. Papadiculous. Van de Zwaan. Patten. Kilimnik. Pinedo … … and now it is the turn of the pathetically over-dressed Roger Stone – a bespoke meal-worm, blinking in the sunlight after poking his head out from his hole in the rotten apple. Oh, if only they would keep Rikers open, just for him! Twenty without parole, in a greasy orange jumpsuit that doesn’t fit properly! Think of the sheer joy that would bring to people who believe in the rule of law.
I have lived in the United States for many years, but I’m still shocked sometimes by the po-faced politeness of so much American political discourse – routinely mistaken for a virtue, I think. It’s meet and proper, to borrow a phrase, for witnesses to speak in carefully measured tones in am impeachment proceeding: theirs after all to report, not to editorialize. But where is the full-throated, unedited moral condemnation, where is the disgust and outrage, over this man and his misbegotten ilk? Where the willingness to speak the moral truth, loud and clear: that each one of the Don’s bag carriers is, like the Great Suppurating Cheesepuff himself, a disease, a shite, a repugnant, unforgivable creep?
(Why do these men retain personal friends, as they apparently do? Why are they not absolutely and entirely pariahs? Why – this seems telling to me – are they not in general considered quite as unspeakably awful as, say, Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein? Have they been less monstrous in their arrogance and self-dealing? Have they done less damage? Are they less dangerous?)
The great sucking sound from Washington today is the Trumpswamp being drained, a little bit … by the courts! Let us pray for much much more of that rich irony. Let us pray that the courts deal in due course with the Communicable-Virus-in-Chief and his almost (but not quite) comically ghastly progeny.
My campaign slogan for 2020: Orange Jumpsuits for the Whole Family. I imagine a webcam, where we can all watch them at the same long trestle table with their friends and clingers-on, under fluorescent strip lights, sewing canvas mailbags – forever. Perhaps this can be at a lovingly un-remodeled Rikers too: nice and chilly, nice and damp.
In Dantean style, I imagine Stone forced to rub The Runt’s sore neck while the Runt screams abuse at him. Eric and Ivanka take turns away from the mailbags to clean out the cell’s night bucket, using Mitch McConnell’s head as brush; Lindsay Graham licks the bucket clean when they’re done.
Oh, and one more detail. Like Gollum imitating Atlas, a sweaty and gibbering Rudy Giuliani is just visible, crouched beneath in a loin cloth, holding up that table.
Postscript: the day after writing this, I find Thomas Friedman in the NYT describing Mike Pompeo as “slimy”and calling out his utter lack of integrity, and the Op-Ed refers to “Mr. Trump’s Washington, a world populated by grifters, self-dealers, liars, and cheats” – so perhaps there is hope. Time to call a shit-shovel a shit-shovel, no?