I looked over this post from the guy known as Lawdog about the latest ruckus over the Epstein file release and the sordid doings of a whole lot of highly-connected people whom one would have thought would have known better. (Besides being a fellow Texan, and an experienced LEO, Lawdog grew up in Africa, where his daddy was employed by a big oil company – some of his stories about his reckless boyhood there are hysterically funny and I recommend them wholeheartedly.) Sigh. Epstein file? Not a file, as I picture such a thing. It’s a whole room full of packed filing cabinets!) and the latest tranche (all? Maybe? I can hope!) has got all the usual parties in a renewed state of tizzy: the National Establishment Media, assorted conspiracy freaks, and Trump haters foaming at the mouth yet again … it is mildly amusing how badly the usual Trump-haters wanted Trump somehow, someway implicated … and yet he has emerged relatively clean, in comparison. This, it would seem, has sent the usual Trump-haters even more spare with frustrated fury – that he had little enough to do with Epstein, other than moving in the same social circles early on, narked him out to criminal investigators, and that Epstein hated his guts for that. Well, you are known for your friends … and very occasionally, by your enemies.

I do find it curious, though, that the coterie of comment trolls – the trollerie – on various general interest news blogs that I follow – keep insisting in comments that Trump is a pedophile. Never anything but the bald assertion, as if repeating it constantly might make it true. Now, from the way that Joe Biden kept getting handsy with small girls, one might find that assertion credible in reference to him. But Trump has been in the public eye since the 1980s; by everything that I ever read or observed about him, his tastes ran more towards tall, female and mature, models and beauty-contestants, mainly.

Lawdog advises, by the way, not getting to sucked too deeply into conspiracy theories in regard to the late Epstein and his currently-incarcerated Girl Friday, Gislaine Maxwell, lest one fall into something like the great Satanic Day Care Abuse hysteria of the mid-1980s. Crusading child therapists and a handful of freaky parents hectored small children into ever-more baroque accusations of ritual abuse in day-care, while over-ambitious prosecutors hungered for headlines and the usual media outlets obliged – it being in the media’s interest to provide screaming headlines about what basically turned out to be improbable sexual fantasies coaxed out of small children. Sanity eventually returned but not until a lot of innocents were convicted and imprisoned for years, businesses and individuals ruined, and children permanently traumatized.

Anyway – back to the matter of Epstein and his network of associates, contacts, victims, willing participants and wholly innocent parties mentioned in casual emails. Of all the various bloggers and editorial comments, I think this interpretation makes the most sense: that Epstein had set himself up as a fixer, an indispensable man, as a connector of influential interested parties, the manager of a network of the right people, who could get things done and who would owe him favors. The bait was the girls and access to their sexual favors, trips in the private jet, the island or ranch luxury, the Satyricon-excess of it all … and a lot of people who ought to have know better still became part of that network. He was a kind of perverted admirable American Creighton – and as such, likely a lot of influential people were in his files, if only in brief mention.

Comment as you wish.