Looks like it's going to be another one of those days, barely a thing worth writing about. Barely a thing.
It's pretty much a normal news week around here. There's been another school shooting. Another train has run off the rails and dumped something you need respirators and hazmat suits to clean up. Tornadoes and blizzards and floods...oh my. And laws have been passed in some state criminalizing being. Again.
But just in time for Good Friday, right?
One would hope there'd be something new. Something different. Something that really never happened before. I've dug and sifted and strained to find one single...
Say what? I'm missing something?
Come on. You think I don't see the orange elephant in the room?
Of course I do. Donald Trump got indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Big deal. It's not like this is the first time he's danced with the legal system.
Two of his companies were convicted last year on 17 counts of tax fraud. His charitable organization was convicted of pocketing donations. Most of his companies have entered bankruptcy court. He's settled more lawsuits out of court than the Landmark has beds, for crying out loud.
Before he was a pretend mogul, the Donald was the Eric to his father Fred the slumlord. He was proxy for his dad on city, state and federal criminal and civil cases, most of which were either settled or pleaded out. Donald got his money AND his legal plays from daddy.
Trump, one of his companies, or one of his close associates are the subject of investigations by a half dozen different legal entities from municipal to state to federal. Stolen classified documents, inciting an attack on congress, pressuring officials to steal elections. And fraud, fraud, fraud.
It would have been news if all these investigations ended in no actions. But here we are.
Granted, indicting Donald Trump on fraud sure seems like low hanging fruit. His entire life is a fraud. He can't open his mouth without lying. It's congenital. Donald is such a fraud he faked a mug shot, since one was never taken, in order to fleece his Maga hatted minions of more of their hard earned cash.
Indicting Donald Trump for fraud is like indicting Stefan Curry for making 3s. Except making 3s, as of this writing, is legal.
Maybe a better analogy would have been like indicting Honest Abe for being honest. Honesty may not have the cache it had in the nineteenth century, but it isn't quite illegal yet.
Which leads me to an important point. There's a very good reason no former president before the last one has been indicted for something. That's because almost none of those guys ever did anything indictable. The one that did was pardoned.
So if you think about it, one or two bad apples out of 46 isn't that bad. What that means is 96% of the time we don't elect a criminal for president of the United States.
And that seems worth celebrating to me. Instead of whining about the first indicted ex-president, drink a toast to our record of electing people smart enough not to be indicted in the first place.