Of Pedophiles and Pedociders

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

–Pogo

Trump warned of the enemy within – unaware that he and his enablers are that enemy. America’s decline was not ushered in by external forces. Rather, it’s Trump – or to be more precise those who voted for him and who continue to support his vendetta-driven attack on the nation – who bear responsibility. Not pro-Palestinian international students. Not American citizens with Spanish surnames. Not fentanyl-exporting Chinese financial institutions, nor Mexican drug traffickers. Not Iranian sleeper cells. No, America created, and then sought protection in, the cellulite-inflected arms of its duly elected, orange-tinted Golem. Now it is paying the price. 

In 1998, Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about his technically “consensual,” if scandalous, affair with a White House intern. Clinton’s conduct was denounced, and other aspects of his sex life were scrutinized with salacious abandon by then-independent counsel Ken Starr, whose investigation ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment. Starr’s moral crusade against Clinton’s indiscretions now reads like projection. The quietly self-righteous Starr – the Jim Jordan of Baylor University – would later have to resign the presidency of that institution amid revelations he had covered up a series of campus sexual assaults, a legacy that sorely undermines his earlier sanctimony. Before his death in 2022, it was also revealed he himself had an affair with one of his advisors during his tenure as independent counsel. 

Starr would go on to unsuccessfully defend Trump during his impeachment. Not that it mattered. Today, the twice-impeached prevaricator extraordinaire, 34-count felon, and adjudicated sex offender is back in the White House, turning the Oval Office into a gold-plated, trophy-laden, gilded bordello, and the rest of it into Mar-a-Lago North.

In America the price paid by the rich and famous for their crimes is heavily discounted. In 2006, Jeffrey Epstein was charged by a Palm Beach County grand jury with solicitation of prostitution. Two years later his legal team, including Starr, whom journalist Joe Conason once dubbed “a pedophile’s best friend” – persuaded federal prosecutors to drop sex trafficking charges against Epstein, securing a “sweetheart plea deal” that saw him serving only 13 months of an 18-month sentence, much of that time spent outside his jail cell, and, as The Palm Beach Post reported, allowing him to travel anywhere so long as he returned in 24 hours. The deal was later ruled illegal, leading to his re-arrest in 2019. 

As for Epstein’s untimely demise, Trump, who once infamously boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support, may finally have a shot at proving it, though the actual crime scene may have been a prison cell in New York and the real culprit an orange-uniformed hired hangman.

Ironically, the man who has repeatedly accused Mexico of sending criminals and rapists to the U.S., now faces intensifying scrutiny over his ties to a convicted pedophile, ties that may run deeper than a mere locker-room bromance. Trump has alleged that Epstein “stole” young spa employees from Mar-a-Lago, including the late Virginia Giuffre, who later accused Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of trafficking her as a minor. Epstein, Like an Alcatrazian alligator, has risen from “the swamp” to bite Trump where it hurts. 

Or so one hopes.

Even Trump loyalists have started to tentatively question the veracity of their Dear Leader –including the QAnon coterie of sycophants who once shielded him from criticism – a shift that may last only until he spins the next lie to deflect from a an overstuffed cornucopia of emerging inconvenient and unvarnished truths.

The irony is stark: innocent Latinos with no criminal record are deported and sent to concentration camps, while Trump roams free to lie, “weave,” extort, and profit financially and politically from behavior that, for others, would cross a redline. 

For Trump, his supporters, and his impotent critics, that redline is – and has always been – a green light. 

But Trump isn’t the only one shielded by impunity. Israel’s engineered famine in Gaza has yet to trigger a meaningful shift in American policy toward the baby-killer state. After all, as the master chefs who have turned Gaza into Hell’s Kitchen might say, you can’t make a racist ethno-state without slaughtering tens of thousands of innocents. Who says we don’t learn from history? Though we seem to have forgotten that ultimate outcome of such half-baked recipes is self-destruction.

Israel, invoking its right to self-defense, insists on its survival at all costs. Yet Hamas will not destroy Israel. Israel will. In the nearly two years since Hamas’ attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s right-wing regime have done more to endanger the Jewish state than any terrorist atrocity by stoking every imaginable antisemitic trope.

Can the world truly tolerate an ethno-state that justifies genocide as a means of self-preservation – especially when the moral foundation upon which it was built has crumbled? Tragically, the answer appears to be yes. While the American government expels immigrants with fascistic fervor, it has welcomed – on three separate occasions – a head of state accused of war crimes. Most audaciously, on his latest visit, he used the opportunity to nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, or, if we’re honest, the Kissinger Secret War/Obama Drone Strike Prize.   

Of course, the death toll in Gaza exceeds that of any hypothetical pedestrian on Fifth Avenue. Israel has wiped out entire families by the thousands, yet still enjoys American government support. It’s almost as if they believe Israel hasn’t killed enough. Or perhaps, like Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), they’re fine with the collateral damage produced by “bad strategy” so long as “offensive aid” isn’t being used (Breaking Points 19:39-24:50) and AIPAC money continues to fill their political war chests. 

This is the same Slotkin who, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (1:45-2:40), can speak passionately, definitively, and at interminable length on the pressing issue of whether hotdogs are sandwiches, but disingenuously hedges on whether the slaughter of civilians in Gaza is genocide (14:43-16:07). 

Pick your poison: pedophiles or pedociders? America, it seems, has chosen both. 

Birds of a feather flock together, whether billionaires with a penchant for younger women or ethno-states with genocidal expansionist ambitions. In this corner, an American president whose current term in office keeps him out of prison. In the other, an Israeli prime minister whose freedom from prosecution on corruption charges has been forestalled by industrialized mass murder, bankrolled by a corrupt American government and its indifferent – or is it pathetically impotent? – constituents.

One nation that wraps itself in “family values” elects as its leader an alleged serial sexual abuser. The other, shouting “Never Again!” engages in genocide, essentially begging critics to retort, “Never say ‘Never Again’ again, unless you mean it universally.”

“Good trouble” is the corollary to unfinished business, the inevitable handmaiden to hypocrisy. There would be no need for it if nations lived up to, rather than betrayed, their foundational principles. 

With all due respect to John Lewis, forget “good trouble.” What’s needed now is great trouble: general strikes, massive, sustained civil disobedience, tax boycotts, and boycotts of any company, any so-called corporate person, that caves to abuses of power, including those who enable pedophilia and pedocide. Not to destroy nations, but to compel them to uphold the values they pretend to champion.

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