Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
|
I obviously love the style of the article. It's quite witty and approaches gonzo as well if not better in some regards than Taibbi.
While I'll send it to anyone I think will read it, I'll do so with a few caveats in my head:
1. The cheap shot at Stone for having been a swinger seems out of place. He who steals the voice of HST cannot also be a provincial scold on sexual matters. The better angle would have been to make fun of Stone's swinging -- perhaps a lurid description of him banging some retired cop's wife while an insurcance agent fucks his on the couch in a Ft Lauderdale Marriott, while everyone passes around the amyls and Viagra... Something along those lines.
2. Stone wants to be convicted. And the felony will not stain him. He wants desperately to be the next G. Gordon Liddy, which is apparent from his decision to testify despite not having to do so. And the conviction will not harm, but actually enhance, his earning potential. Liddy made a bundle on the speaking circuit and as a pitch man for gold backed securities. Stone was a has been and an object of skepticism before this indictment and conviction. Most people, myself included, assumed he was full of shit about his claims. I still think he's a two bit player who's largely full of shit about his claims. But the prospective audiences for his shtick don't know that. He'll be a hit at venues where people deify notions like, as Jimmy told Henry in
Goodfellas, "always shut your mouth and don't rat on your friends."
And that seems to be what he desires. To go out as some sort of strange hero, the last Nixon sycophant observing omertà.
3. Rat fucking is not a crime, and it is not okay to maximize sentences against people who you think are odious.
I think Stone is a comic buffoon. You think he is a terrible, odious person. (I think those judgments more appropriately fit people who've actually done terrible things with real power, like Gingrich.) But mine or yours or this author's moral judgments (and he says Stone should do maximum time on moral bases as well as legal ones) are not the law. Handing out jail terms for rat-fuckery is, to borrow HST's phrase, "handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500."
Rat-fuckery is part of politics. And if we must create a list of lecherous rat-fucks, with Lee Atwater at the top, W's rat-fucking McCain with racist pamphlets about his adopted kids, Bubba's dog-whistles to racists in the South designed to kneecap Obama, and Hillary's/Wasserman-Schultze's efforts to game the system to ensure torpedoing of Bernie in 2016 (he'd have lost anyway, but those rat-fuckers weren't leaving anything to chance) are certainly far more significant than any of Stone's rat-fuckery.*
So no, we shouldn't, we can't, allow our moral judgment (and every man's morals are different, so what the hell is the baseline anyway?) to infect sentencing. That's making ones' self the law in the same manner Trump seeks to normalize the idea he is the law.
4. The author's belief that Barr bends to the will of his master is laughable. Barr isn't the one who answers. Barr is the One Who Knocks. He needn't read Trump's tweet to know what to do. He is naturally aligned with Trump. He'd already moved to undo the first sentencing memo before Trump's tweet hit the internet.
Gore Vidal said there are no conspiracies, just groups of people with similar interests whose actions compliment each other. What appears planned to the 90 IQ person seeking to understand the world thru conspiracy theory is actually aligned actors aligning in their actions. Barr knows what to do before Trump and has already set about doing it.
- - -
Other than that, thank you for a wildly entertaining article. The use of fluffer and spank bank and Barr's 54 inch waist are juvenile, some would say cheap. I'd say they're quite satisfying, and while I disagree with some of this cat's reasoning, I'm definitely going to put a google alert into the system to read his future pieces.
______
* The ultimate rat-fucks of all time are LBJ for continuing Vietnam for political reasons (to avoid being the President on whose watch a futile war was aborted), Nixon for attempting the same, HW for countenancing the Willie Horton ad, JFK and Daley for stealing an election, Reagan for opening his campaign with racist dog whistles in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Bubba for
executing a mentally handicapped man in an election year to look tough on crime. (I like Bubba. But if there is a hell, I will be there for things I've done as a lawyer, as will most of us here who've worked in litigation... But we're going to be in the low-torture rings, at the far edges, where the heat only reaches summer-in-Dubai. Bubba's going to be in the center, perhaps even shackled at the seat of the Big Man, like Carrie Fisher was tethered to Jabba the Hut. (Hillary will not go to Hell. She's been there in this life, married to Bill and losing to his Orangeness. I think she might even get sainthood and a sweet set of wings, St. Peter imploring God, "Fuck, Yahweh... throw the poor lady a bone.")
