Byron York made an excellent suggestion today,
The fever swamps have become so excited about the Epstein emails that we need someone to come up with a new grand unified theory to fit the tidbits.
I don’t have one. In fact, the more I look into the Epstein matter, the more the real meaning recedes beyond the horizon.
About those emails:
The Hill:Looming House vote deepens Trump’s Epstein woes
The Hill assures me that,”The Jeffrey Epstein saga is bad and getting worse for President Trump.” Why is that? The Hill tells me, “New impetus around the Epstein scandal hurts Trump at a time when his approval ratings are already at or near all-time lows.”
Is it the timing? Or is it the underlying data in “the Epstein files”? Or is it just bad for Trump because it’s been decided that it’s bad for Trump?
To find out I read,
The Hill: 5 revelations from the latest Jeffrey Epstein document dump by Democrats, Republicans
Five weren’t enough, so I read,
Politico:The 9 most shocking revelations in the Epstein docs
Read them for yourself. What am I missing? These “revelations” strike me as more exculpatory than incriminating. More gossipy than “shocking.” Not a single email was addressed to, or received from, Trump. Three emails out of 20,000 or so that merely mention him by name.
We’ve reached the point in our de-evolution of political discourse where the debate is not about any thing anymore. The debate is about the debate around what the debate says about…what were were talking about again?
It’s a second-derivative abstraction of the idea that the “coverup is worse than the crime.” It’s a truism that deconstructs itself into nothingness.
Except in this case, Epstein’s crimes really were worse. I thought the idea we were working toward was bringing to justice a group of powerful people who had committed horrible crimes. Perhaps that was never possible. Perhaps that was once possible, but not at this late date. But nothing I can see from the Epstein discourse seems useful in that direction.
In any event, the list (if it still exists, if it ever existed) never included Trump. So what are we doing here? What is the thing to be found (or found out) at the end of this process? The man himself, Jeffrey Epstein, appears to have been abstracted from a once-corporeal being into an idea signifying…I’m not sure what.
The Hill seems equally befuddled,
In addition, the Epstein matter is not a controversy that splits neatly along partisan lines, as so many furors revolving around Trump do.
The Epstein files now occupy a place in the public imagination similar to the “X Files” or the JFK files. Perhaps they are located in that same subterranean vault, beneath the Rocky Mountains, next to the wooden crate containing the Ark of the Covenant.
We already have the flight logs. What are in these files that we don’t already know? What secret hidden knowledge to they contain?
The Hill includes this quote,
Explaining her decision in a late-night social media post on Wednesday, [Rep. Nancy] Mace wrote, “I stand with all survivors” and added “God Bless all those who never had a fighting chance. The Epstein vote will be for you too.”
Solidarity? Transparency? What do we talk about when we talk about Epstein?
