Scandal Stew

I am quietly enjoying the summer stew engulfing the White House.

Watching Bondi, Bongino, Patel, and Blanche take turns diving into the simmering soup is just delicious. Like those cartoon missionaries bobbing around in the pot while the natives dance their happy dance around the perimeter, these folks are in hot water.

Yes, the crimes at the heart of this scandal are despicable. But that is the point. From Pizzagate to QAnon, ultraconservative wingnuts have tried to tie the Democratic Party to the deep state hell of pedophilia and human trafficking. And the bottle blonde cheer leader at the head of the drum line has been the 47^th President of the United States, Donald Trump.

The boy loves a good scandal.

From the “Birther” controversy that he created to vault into national politics, to his indictment of Daddy Cruz as a Kennedy assassin, to the Big Steal fairytale, he has manufactured a decade of vile bumper stickers to direct public attention away from his own turpitude and failures.

But uh, oh. The same Fox News personalities who perpetuated the Epstein scandal and tied the secrecy surrounding the documentary evidence to the Democrats are now in charge. They are in control of the very levers of power that they attacked day after day. If non-disclosure of the Epstein files by the Obama and Biden Administrations was clear evidence of their complicity in Epstein’s crimes, then how are we to assess the denial of access by the Trump Administration?

Well, even some members of MAGA have changed their minds about the President's purity. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. * Not to mention in the District of Columbia, Mar-a-Lago, and points in between.

The other part of the story that has become crystal clear since January 20 is that while Pam Bondi and the others are in control of the mundane decisions of their daily lives, what they do on the job is being dictated by Trump. So, they lean out over their skis at their own risk. “I have the files right on my desk” becomes “there is nothing in these files.” The same names of victims and rapists that Bondi was demanding for years have fallen off the pages and been vacuumed up by the night cleaning crew.

But wait, there are still heroes in our midst.

Joe DiMaggio has been joined by the Wall Street Journal...our nation turns its lonely eyes to you...as our hope for a window of truth in this sad world. The obscene birthday card story about a private citizen doodling a vile piece of art for another alley cat friend was no Watergate moment. But the discovery of FBI agents scouring the Epstein files for mentions of Trump, and Bondi having face to face meetings with the President to report the results is nuclear. It might be a finalist for the Cover Up Hall of Fame, right beside Nixon tape erasures, Fawn Hall’s boots, and Sandy Berger’s socks. And the clumsy way it is being handled is as funny as the night Fanne Fox jumped out of Wilbur Mill’s car and took a swim in the Tidal Basin. (We’ll pause here for the younger members of our audience to Google some of these names.)

The other heroes are the same career attorneys at the Department of Justice who told previous administrations that they couldn't release raw investigation files or grand jury testimony. Both are filled with unsubstantiated tips, testimony, and tidbits of truth and fiction that could unfairly damage the lives of innocent parties. Professional civil servants are put in place to curb the political appetites of elected officials and their appointees. The gap between motivations has always been there. With the Trump amateur-hour nest of ideologues, it is oceanic in dimension.

So, Trump's defense for non-disclosure? He spun through his mental rolodex of putrid projection and chose “Hoax” and “Treason” as the Sesame Street words of the day. The entire Epstein matter (that he, Bondi, Bongino, and Patel perpetuated for years) is now a hoax. Never mind the hundreds of hours of airtime and thousands of words of social media text that have been used to keep this scandal front and center and draped around the necks of the Democrats.

All a hoax. Nothing to see here.

And, by the way, Barack Obama committed treason by "hiding" the intel that Russian did not have the capability to influence the 2016 presidential election.

The Russia story comes from “shocking” new emails released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard that document the Obama Administration knew Russia did not have the means to attack voting machines and change the election results. But (and we are talking about one enormous butt here) they also knew that a tsunami of falsely-sourced Russian misinformation was released on social media to damage Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump.

It was Tulsi Gabbard’s transparent effort to get back in Trump’s good graces (remember her “Iran not close to a bombshell” bombshell?) that motivated this “shocking” email diversion. But, yet again, the clown car cabinet has hired clown car staff who didn’t remember that Marco Rubio as cochair of the Senate Intel Committee had signed a report that came to the exact same conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election as the Obama Administration.

Is this clumsy release and new investigation enough to get Tulsi back at the cool kids table in the White House Mess? Only time will tell.

But folks, the thing that fries my potatoes is that THEY THINK WE ARE SO STUPID THAT WE CAN’T SEE THROUGH THIS BULLSHIT.

Oops. Shifted into Donald Trump capital letters mode there. Sorry.

Well, we are not. And there are clearly cracks in the Trump inner circle or the Wall Street Journal would not have the information that has come their way. Daily leaks are what blew apart Trump’s first term and I predict will do him in again. It is not the Washington Post or the New York Times that released the most recent damaging details of this Epstein files screening but Rupert Murdock’s own WSJ. And unlike CBS and Fox News, The Journal ain’t gonna to fold up like a $5 card table.  

So stayed tuned sports fans. How long before the Trump mentions in the files start to appear? How many true and AI-crafted photos of Trump, Epstein, and the girls whose lives they destroyed are ahead?

The lightness of my tone should not imply the offenses are trivial. They are not. These are real victims who were used and then thrown away. If continuing to stir the pot means that justice will eventually be served, I am happy to take my turn at the stove. I continue to believe that either in the courts of law or in the eventual judgement of history, right will prevail.

*The famous line from the play Hamlet, spoken by the guard Marcellus after witnessing the ghostly appearance of Hamlet’s father.