Your Weekend Message From The Master
Charles Pierce Gets A Note From An Old Friend
The following piece is a semi-satirical piece from Charlie Pierce, who writes The Politics Blog at Esquire.com. It is a running gag of his, that hasn’t been run in a few years, involving the New York Times’ David Brooks and his dog, Moral Hazard. What follows in his weekly newsletter to subscribers is a light-hearted touch to a serious matter.
“The letter came in the mail on Thursday. I instantly knew from the paw print who had sent it. I had lost touch a long time ago with Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned by The New York Times columnist David Brooks. I hadn’t heard anything from him since he took a buyout from the NYT. I heard he’d moved to a nice farm upstate where he was teaching Government at a local high-rent kennel and working on a memoir. I opened the envelope and saw that the note inside began, simply:
“Do you believe this shit? I mean, holy fck.”
Enclosed were a couple of newspaper clips. One was from The Guardian:
The New York Times columnist David Brooks appeared in multiple photos from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein that were released on Thursday by the House committee on oversight and government reform. The photos, which have been rolled out in batches by the minority Democrats in the committee, lack crucial context, including dates and locations. But the photos appear to show Brooks attending a lunch or dinner event. Brooks is shown seated next to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. In a statement, The New York Times said the event took place in 2011, three years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to charges of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18.
In the margin of the clipping was written, “Do any of these people have mirrors?”
The timing of the release is notable. Last month Brooks published a column in the Times saying that he was not interested in the long-unfolding Epstein scandal. “Why is Epstein the top issue in American life right now?” Brooks wrote. “Well, in an age in which more and more people get their news from short videos, if you’re in politics, the media or online it pays to focus on topics that are salacious, are easy to understand and allow you to offer self-confident opinions with no actual knowledge.”
Also in the envelope was a copy of the statement released by The New York Times:
As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event,” a Times spokeswoman said. “Mr Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.
On the back of this slice of newsprint was written, “How could he write that column if he knew those photos were out there? Now you see why I took the buyout. Now all those whispered conversations around the fire at the Young Fogies Club make sense. (By the way, what is the Downward Dog? I always thought it was about my drunk uncle.) I am going out on the porch now to lick my balls in deep contemplation of the sorry state of our nation. Happy holidays. MH.”
And thus begins our stroll through the sewage that is the American elites with Moral Hazard as the Virgil to our Dante, guiding us through the seven circles of Sleaze, just in time for Christmas, as Jesus intended. Here they come a’wastrel-ing.
As more Epstein-related files are released, Americans are going to learn even more about the powerful connections the deceased sex offender had.
Julia Beverly // Getty Images
American distrust of its elites was bred in the bone of the Republic. Almost from its birth, the history of the country has been marked by the rise of the elites and a corresponding distrust among the people at large. It was the emotional charge beneath both Shays’ and the Whiskey Rebellions. It was a primary element of the general ratfcking in the bloody election of 1800.
Thomas Jefferson’s supporters accused President John Adams of being a royalist. (He also was accused of being a hermaphrodite, which seems harsh.) Meanwhile, Federalist supporters accused Jefferson of being a tool of the decadent slaveholding elite in the South—which, alas, was partly true in that Jefferson at least was a member of that group. Down through the years, that distrust has been very politically useful to both parties. But the true master of grievance politics in this regard was that genocidal madman, President Andrew Jackson.
He ran against a rotating roster of elites: political, economic, and educational. In 1828, he cast President John Quincy Adams, who had defeated him in the disputed “corrupt bargain” election of 1824, as an overeducated fop unfamiliar with the concerns of the small farmers and tradesmen of whom he posed as a tribune. He used this, with the help of his vice president, Martin Van Buren, as the means to create the modern political party, the very creature that had so terrified many of the actual Founders. As president, Jackson continued to stay in character. He threw open the White House to celebrate his inauguration. (“There’s mud on the carpets, mother!”)
The West Wing got two episodes out of the time Jackson once left a 1,400-pound block of cheddar cheese, a gift from a fromager named Thomas Meecham in upstate New York, in the White House at a party celebrating the end of his two terms as president. It was hauled into the East Room and the doors were opened to anyone who wanted to partake.
In a piece in Popular Science, Tom Hawking quotes a contemporary journalist’s account of what came next.
“The air was redolent with cheese, the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was talked about at Washington that day.”
(The cheese wheel had been hanging around the lobby of the White House for a year, and it had stunk up the joint already, so Jackson’s beneficence wasn’t entirely a populist gesture.) A more serious demonstration of Jackson’s assault on what he perceived as elites is his message to Congress announcing his veto of the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States. Jackson wrote:
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.
God only knows what Ol’ Hickory would think of the Epstein Files. But I suspect horsewhips would be involved.
The [latest Epstein files] release also includes several photos of quotes from the Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita written in black ink across different parts of a woman’s body, like her chest, foot, hipbone, and back. Lolita tells the story of a young girl who was groomed by a middle-aged literature professor.
I think I speak for the entire congregation when I run out of the room and vomit on my front lawn.
The slow, drip-drip-drip of the release of the files is the perfect Washington scandal in that it has all the aspects of what used to be called a “mini-series” on television. It is extraordinarily well-written, with a steadily increasing drumbeat of lubricious perversion among the rich and influential. It is building relentlessly to a thunderous climax, you should pardon the expression.
On Friday, deputy attorney-general Todd Blanche, a member of the president’s previous incompetent legal team, already began crawfishing about releasing all the material that Congress had mandated be released that day. From The Hill:
Blanche told Fox News the Justice Department would release “several hundred thousand” documents on Friday, “and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more…So today is the 30 days when I expect that we’re going to release several hundred thousand documents today. And those documents will come in in all different forms, photographs and other materials associated with, with all of the investigations into, into Mr. Epstein. What we’re doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story, to the extent it needs to be protected, is completely protected. And so I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks.”
Democrats, as well as Rep. Thomas Massie, the Republican who spearheaded the maneuver that got the bill mandating the release of the files through the House, immediately jumped on Blanche and his boss, Pam Bondi, with both feet. The power of the narrative compels him, and there’s a run on horsewhips at all fine leather goods outlets.”