Charlie Pierce, Esquire - I copied the whole piece from behind the pay wall.
It took me a couple of tries to wade through the muck of the indictment that the Southern District of New York dropped on Jeffrey Epstein on Monday. Every time I got sort of rolling, I'd run into a sentence like this:
Epstein typically would also masturbate during these sexualized encounters, ask victims to touch him while he masturbated, and touch victims' genitals with his hands or with sex toys.
It is impossible that Epstein's many influential friends and houseguests didn't know about this. Apparently, Epstein was not shy about his predilections. The current President* of the United States was a frequent running buddy, and he said in New York magazine back in 2002:
I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.
And before the flying monkeys take wing, let me say that, if any Democratic politician was involved in these late Roman Empire hootenannys, that person should be convicted and buried under the jail as well. This is not a stick-to-politics moment. This is going to screw up the political moment good and proper, though. Unless Epstein cuts a quick deal at the encouragement of all those people who suddenly don't know him anymore, this is going to be a long and garish public spectacle. It's going to devour news cycle after news cycle. And if anything emerges connecting the president* directly to Epstein's alleged crimes, there isn't going to be a news cycle anymore. There will be only this story, over and over again.
This, after all, is the lubricious dark side of the Masters of the Universe mentality that brought us the near collapse of the world economy, and which too many powerful people in our politics became far too comfortable in embracing. If there are no rules worth keeping in business, why should there be any rules worth keeping in your off-hours? (How confident was Epstein that the bell would never toll for him? According to the FBI, they found he'd carefully labeled all the kiddie porn in his collection.) If everything is a commodity to be bought and sold, and if the basic business plan of all your peers is fraud, why stop at just collateralizing home loans? Why not collateralize young girls? After all, of all the deadly sins, greed and lust are the closest cousins.
Meanwhile, a lot of women are finally going to get a chance to tell their stories, and to make whatever peace they can with having been caught up in a ghastly series of events that would shame the Borgias. If some of the people who exploited them are destroyed in the process, that is not their concern, nor ours. Fitzgerald was more right than he knew: the rich are different from you and me. Some of them are monsters.
I don't think I can be quite as optimistic as Charlie sounds here. I think the GOP has become obsessed with their Plutocracy Project, to the point where the calculus is already in place - they'll stay mum and let the thing slide, absorbing and assimilating the shittiness of it all, so the rubes can wear the shame of it like a fucking shield.
Once I get you to accept the absurdity, I can get talk you into committing the atrocity.
