Convicted felon Donald. J. Trump was in a New York City courtroom today where he was sentenced to bear no burden and suffer no penalty for cooking the books during his 2016 presidential campaign to hide from regulators and voters how he paid off a porn star to hide from voters that he’d had an affair with her.
It reminds of this time, in the late 1990s, when I was a Sergeant in the Marines at Camp Pendleton, I got a Master Sergeant so mad I thought he was going to attack me at the lunch table for laying out the argument that, by letting cops have the discretion to give you a ticket or not when you’ve exceeded the speed limit, we’d done away with the rule of law.
And that if we cared about our oath to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” that we were bound by that oath to prosecute civilian cops who gave warnings to speeders for dereliction of duty because doing away with the rule of law was a threat to National Security.
And that if we, as the protectors of the Constitution, weren’t willing to jail derelict cops who didn’t enforce traffic laws, we should just do away with the Constitution now because discretionary power without accountability is corrosive to the rule of law and would rust it from the inside out so that everything would look fine until you really needed it, when it would fail without warning, and it would be better to know it had failed so we could be forced, as a society, to fix it.
He got cartoonishly red in the face, his veins popped out of his neck, and he called me, in the angriest way possible, a “smart guy” and an “idealist”. He really didn’t like me before this conversation, but he hated me after it.
(To be fair, he was, without peer, the most opprobrious person I ever encountered wearing the uniform and I didn’t like him very much either.)
Good times.
Anyhow, I hate being right about stuff like this.