Years ago, I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh talking about a scandal that was going on then (I can’t remember which one), saying something like, “This issue will never get settled in the media as long as it has a negative impact on the Democrats.” In this, he was correct.
I thought about this while watching the shallow and contrived outrage during the recent hearings with Attorney General Pam Bondi, and as I reflected on the past six and a half years since Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, I couldn’t help but ask: where have these people been?
Where were they when we were going to see “Sound of Freedom,” a movie that was generally panned by the mainstream critics as a QAnon conspiracy theory? Or when we surmised quite rationally that – since he was involved with such high-level people – Epstein might not have killed himself at all? Oh, that’s right, they, once again, called us conspiracy theorists.
Nevertheless, the outrage persists.
“The American people have a right to know the answers to this! This is not a game,” said U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) in the congressional hearing.
You have “prioritized obstruction over justice!” said U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).
“Will you turn to [the survivors] … and apologize for what your Department of Justice [has done]?” asked U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
Bondi’s reticence notwithstanding, there’s an obvious hypocrisy, a bold relativism, that is troubling. Are we really to think, truly, and in our hearts, that the Epstein issue is only important now that it involves President Trump? I don’t see how anyone could believe this, yet the outrage persists.
Even my friend Mr. Green came in the other day, light as a feather, his face a mixture of spryness and moral superiority.
“What do you think about this Epstein stuff?” he asked me.
“I think the same thing I thought when it all started, back when you and I talked of it during the last presidential election, and you made such sport, pretending I was crazy,” I told him.
He shrugged his shoulders and looked off. “It’s going to all come back to the president,” he said, turning back finally.
I thought for a moment. I knew I was going to answer him, for I did not want to do to him what the attorney general had done in Congress, but in reality, the answer is no easier for me than it is for Bondi or the rest of us.
“It could,” I said finally. “But it could also be that the most accusatory parts about him, which are secondhand and have the same feel and sound as elements of the Russian dossier, could’ve been put there by the Biden Justice Department. After all, they controlled the case for four years, and it wouldn’t be the first time.”
Green cocked an eyebrow. “So, you don’t believe what was said in it about Trump?” he said as though suddenly sensing a moral failing on my part in which he couldn’t help but relish.
"Now that we know the Russian dossier was fake, are you telling me that the same people who cooked that up couldn’t do the same on this?” I asked.
He rose and shook his head as if his ears had water in them. “He’s going to go down,” he said. “Just you wait. It’s all going to fold in on him. You’ll see.”
“I have been waiting,” I said. “I’ve been waiting much longer than you, actually. A lot of us have.”
Before he left, I thought once again about what Limbaugh had said, and I asked Green, “How do you do it?”
“How do I do what?” asked Green.
“Spend all these years, mocking the right, making fun of something like child sex trafficking, then take it on suddenly as if you yourself discovered it, and all with the superiority of a lavish Renaissance pope? I just don’t get it.”
He grinned cleverly. “Sometimes you just have to take it as it comes,” he said, as though in this lay the secret of the universe. And in that moment, if I’m being honest, I couldn’t help but envy his stupendous simplicity.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
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