STEVE REID
Editor & Publisher
sreid@lbknews.com
Vapid, soulless, deflective.
But at least Pam Bondi is an age-appropriate victim of Donald Trump and the late Jeffrey Epstein. But here is the distinction of consent: Pam Bondi chooses to be screwed by Donald Trump and the legacy of Jeffrey Epstein.
Pam Bondi, in her ascension to power, used the obvious playbook that Donald Trump is not immune to: youth and good looks. And guess what? That’s where she has lost her soul, lost her way, and in many ways is tossing aside the very responsibilities and significance of this country.
Witnessing Bondi carry on like a bad defensive ad campaign for Donald Trump is not like grasping for the railing of the Titanic, It is like grasping at the yellow orange wisp of hair on a drowning man who should never have been swimming in the waters of American government in the first place.
Medicine worse than the disease
I know many people like Trump as an antidote to the soft, wishy-washy Biden era, and the gender-neutral and police-hating era of Obama. And of course, it’s refreshing to hear tough talk and to hear pro-business sentiments. But not at the cost of the Constitution, and not at the cost of our humanity, and not at the divisive cost of illegal acts that will be extremely hard to repair and undo.
When will people in this area and this district stop defending the defenseless, stop deflecting, and being little “Mini-Me” Pam Bondis every day? When will they finally say, “Maybe there’s some merit to this?”
Are there really so many nascent, repressed males of an aging morphology who are going to defend this nonsense? Who have no shame? Who have no empathy? Don’t they have granddaughters and daughters? I have four daughters: I wouldn’t let Donald Trump walk near them.
So, without going into politics and the nuances of environmental policy, energy policy, the policy towards Israel or toward Ukraine, or all the differences we could have about Greenland or Canada, let’s hone in on one salient issue that really goes to the heart of a man and his view of the world, and his view of the law, and his respect for the very establishment he is here to protect and defend — all the while he’s eroding it.
Illness, shrillness and the life of a shill
It’s unconscionable. I’ve never seen someone use all their powers, all their verbal illness and shrillness, to be a shill.
Yeats said the world would end not with a bang but with a whimper. But it won’t be the whimper of the oceans rising over Florida; it won’t be the whimper of principles being eroded day by day. It could simply be a moment in time when the whimper of a victim goes unheard and has to fight against, ironically, and be re-victimized again and again — by the President no less.
And if he’s willing to victimize them, and if he’s willing to defend this, and if Pam Bondi is willing to defend this, then hope erodes silently, softly, day by day, into the morass.
It’s not the first time this has happened; just read about Nero, just read about the Roman Empire dissolving and the kind of leaders you get at the end of a historical cycle. This is not the beginning, and for those who think it’s “Make America Great Again” or the beginning of a great new day, they don’t understand history. What they have is attitude and opinions.
If we’re going to come together, and if we can agree on one thing in this country, it should be this: we need an independant Justice Department that will prosecute sex offenders against minors and will stop being a political front. Because when that’s gone, this whole great experiment has slipped away.
Eroding a generation
On a personal note, I have four daughters and two sons, and instinctively, I’m repulsed by the example of an Attorney General defending sleaze — which is basically the old-fashioned word for all of this.
Actually, this is way beyond sleaze, defending these kind of exploitative relationships is nothing short of disturbing and sadly eroding any belief or faith children would have in a system that is there to protect people.
A President should be honorable; he should be a point of light. Bill Clinton, too, hurt his reputation, but this transcends anything that has been seen in American history.
And then I thought, it is not just my daughters, it’s my sons who also are affected.
Is this the example of powerful male behavior that we are going to show? And is this the example of how you should use power in your life when you’re in a position of power? It erodes everything we teach our children and everything we should be feeling about ourselves and each other.
It is time to stop defending the indefensible and stop aligning yourself as if we’re in a football match choosing sides. There are no sides here; everyone’s losing. Everyone is being pulled into this—the entire nation, the entire world—and we’re spinning slowly, sadly, into a Sargasso Sea for which there is no boat, no life raft, no bobber—just a whirlpool plunging ever further downward.
