Keyboard In The Gutter

     Was it only yesterday that a big tranche -- or perhaps a splatter -- of Jeffrey Epstein's emails were made public?  Politicians are circling the fetid mess; most Republican politicians say the contents contain nothing significant, showing only that President Trump and the late sex offender moved in the same elite circles, while their Democrat counterparts are highlighting passages and conversations that put Mr. Trump in a bad light.

     Absolute smoking-gun evidence or sweeping exoneration has yet to be unearthed and I doubt it will.  The emails do show Epstein and most of his correspondents were shockingly shallow, banal and unconcerned with the banalities of spelling, grammar or even coherence, reveling in sleazy innuendo and treating women as property: America's financial and social elite is riddled with mentally-lazy creeps.

     What the President knew and when did he first learn of it?  I don't know.  I doubt these emails will reveal it.  What they do show is a bunch of emotionally stunted, manipulative men whose lives are lubricated by gobs of money, sliming their way through life along and over the edges of moral behavior with no regard for boundaries, scorning probity as a scam for chumps.

     A few online commenters have cautioned, "What if there are Democrats among Epstein's circle?"  I'm sure there were; I'm sure many of them are still in public life and they deserve to be removed from office just as much as any Republican running with that crowd.  Turf 'em all out.  Primary them.  Get some new crooks in there, people with fewer connections.  They may still be terrible people, but it'll take them awhile to pick up the game, and if we keep voting the old ones out and new ones in, they'll have less time to wallow in the ooze.

     Another question the emails don't answer is how Jeffrey Epstein funded his decadent lifestyle; at times, they imply something on the very edge of blackmail or extortion, but -- yet again -- hard evidence isn't there.  Just a lot of skin-crawling stuff, hints and nudges.  He's clearly trading in influence and access.

     If you're happy making excuses for gazillionaires with stomach-churning private lives, nothing in the emails will change your mind.  If you were looking sidelong at this sort of thing already, here are steaming piles of the same ick.

     This isn't the big chunk of files that Congress may yet release, but those are probably going to be pulled from the same cesspool.

     F. Scott Fitzgerald's, "The very rich are different from you and me," wasn't written in admiration (or even in quite that way) but in disappointment; and Hemingway's rejoinder, "Yes. they have more money," is far too glib.  An excess of money lets people people be even more who they already were.  Freed from the necessity of earning a living by the sweat of their brow, lot of people turn out to be self-indulgent moral cripples for whom other individuals aren't quite real -- especially those who work for wages.  We live in a representative democracy; why are we letting these wretches run our government?