Snatchgate

We have entrusted our rulers, at great moral and material cost, to Keep Us Safe.

We have agreed to allow them to torture defenseless detainees, to keep them locked up for life without due process, to subject the Muslim and Arab population of our society to a relentless campaign of political intimidation so that they are too terrified to object to U.S. policy at home or abroad. We have built a vast snooping apparatus based on blind faith that our bosses are good guys and gals who will never turn this machinery against apolitical, indifferent white people. We have funded all this with untold hundreds of billions of dollars while our schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, trains, and cities decline and the sick, the destitute, the down-and-out, the infirm, the fragile, the addicted, the troubled, the wounded veterans, the jobless, the marginal, the unnecessary all tossed onto the garbage heap, all in the name of Security. We submit to body cavity searches, to reviews of our Facebook data and our library cards, to permanent monitoring of our whereabouts via cellphone towers, to the construction of a mega-storehouse of our private affairs in the Mormon deserts of Utah, to airport MRIs staffed by neurotic, shouting guards whose only regret is that they were born too late for service at Chelmno or Theresienstadt. We accept the mass incarceration of millions of citizens. Despite our visceral hatred of taxes that might indirectly contribute to someone else’s well-being, we agree to pay for all this with our garnisheed wages.

And so what do our fearless Guardians of Safety do when entrusted with these noble missions at the highest level of the state? They pay hookers for sex.

What better demonstration of the debased, corrupted spirit at the heart of our national polity than this pathetic frat-boy beat-off party on the government dime in a foreign country preparing to host the maximum authority of the state? The response from the Obama Administration, as always, is a spineless and ultimately complicit vow to stage an ‘investigation’, which will drag on until the whole thing is forgotten. A real leader would have bounced the head of the Secret Service on principle and put in a deputy. But no one at the top need fear retribution even for the gravest fuck-ups. Bankers loot, generals lose wars, regulators snooze, lawyers persecute, cops snoop, and bodyguards brag while fucking with whores.