Saturday, August 10, 2019

Schlockmeister

Image by Mayday Productions.

As I was telling somebody with reference to the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the immediate batches of conspiracy theories arising around it, I can't stand it when real life starts resembling this schlocky kind of fiction. I'm contented to believe Epstein was ready to die and succeeded because of the ineptness and negligence of his guards, as explained by a couple of members of the fraternity on NBC:
Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who resigned his post in May, wrote in a tweet that people who face charges similar to Epstein's are often at a high risk of suicide and that several defendants released on bail in cases in Maryland, where Rosenstein was formerly U.S. attorney, died of suicide.
"Stopping people from harming themselves is difficult," he said.
Jack Donson, a former longtime federal Bureau of Prisons case manager, told NBC News that suicide watch in federal lockup "usually only lasts a few days to week" due to the amount of manpower the 24-hour surveillance entails.
"It requires staff to do overtime shifts" and is "not considered a good use of resources," Donson said. 


And I don't even care. If anybody thought they were going to silence him, it seems likely they were wrong:

But the schlock never stops in today's news, and there's this other thing, with which I was briefly involved. Tito Anchondo, the body shop guy whose nephew Paul was the two-month-old orphan of two victims of the El Paso massacre, was interviewed on Wednesday on NPR in a very affecting segment, at the end of which he did something odd: started talking to the interviewer about how he'd like to meet Trump on his El Paso visit, really kind of asking the radio network to help him out:

The precise words, transcribed this morning by Connie Schultz, were, "I want to see his reaction in person. I want to see if he's genuine & see if my political views are right or wrong. And see if he feels maybe some kind of remorse for statements that he's made. I just want to have a human-to-human talk with him and see how he feels."

But then after he did manage to meet with Trump for that ghastly picture with Trump thumb up and grinning like an enraged chimpanzee and Melania uncomfortably holding the baby, it sounds as if they didn't have a human-to-human talk at all.
It doesn't feel quite right. And meanwhile from the side of the baby's mother, people who refused to meet with Trump, some pretty angry accusations found on her Facebook page:


Do you think Uncle Tito could have been asking the Emperor for some cash? OK, I'm out of here. I'll try to get back to thinking about more elevated topics soon.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

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