I was a little behind on my Amex bill, so I took a train to Washington, D.C., moseyed on over to the Capitol and tossed a baseball through a window.
Bullseye.
Police sprinted toward me, but really, there was no need to exert themselves. I welcomed them with outstretched arms. “‘Cuff me!” I said brightly. “I need the cash!”
Political victimhood through political vandalism is a bull market these days.
Courtesy
Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.
Who doesn’t want a slice of Donald Trump’s newly minted cache o’ corruption?
Trump, the president, said he would graciously stop suing Trump’s IRS for $10 billion if he gets $1.8 billion to give to Trump’s Department of Justice, run by Trump’s former personal lawyer, to be distributed to the whiniest whiners in the land.
Think the government has wronged you? Come and get it.
It’s not only Ghislaine Maxwell cackling in anticipation.
Listen closely, and you can hear the cheering from that subset of Trump aficionados who turn on Fox News first thing in the morning and come away convinced that every day in every way, somebody somewhere owes them something.
Not all Trump supporters feel this way. But who could be more aggrieved than the Capitol Hill tourist burdened with buying zip ties in bulk on Jan. 6?
Who has suffered more than the elk-horned Moose-man wandering the halls of Congress that day only to be forced by law and transient sanity to say “Sorry!”
Burdened with that faux regret ever since, he has only recently been freed to speak his heart. Regrets, he said, “They’re like sandbags on a hot air balloon.”
That ought to be good for, say, a cool $50,000.
For that matter, how many chiropractic bills have been incurred by members of Congress who needed help untwisting their backbones contorted by bowing to Trump’s demands?
Victims, each and every one. Of their own party. Their own decisions.
Surely that’s worth a visit to the DOJ’s ATM.
While I waited for my own payday, Capitol Police threw me into a holding cell already crowded with lawfare casualties.
Jack Smith was there. So were Anthony Fauci, Jerome Powell, James Comey, Letitia James, “Coach” Tim Walz and of course, Joe Biden’s autopen. A bag of seashells was in the corner, claiming reputational damage.
Nor should anyone overlook the hit that the people at Four Seasons Landscaping took.
It wasn’t their fault that Rudy Giuliani mistook it for a same-named four-star hotel proximate to a sex shop and a crematorium. They didn’t force Rudy to haul out a lectern, scaring roses into an early wilt and earning himself nine felony counts of trying to overturn an election.
Nevertheless, it was gardener guilt by association. Oh how they’ve paid. And they can’t depend on sales of “Make America Rake Again (We are Not a Hotel)” T-shirts forever.
There is some dissent to Trump’s bunco banking swindle.
It forced Associate Attorney General Stan “taking-paychecks-from-Trump’s-DOJ” Woodward to do the damage control dance.
“It’s way, way, way too early for us to rush to judgment on whether this was a good or a bad idea or to describe it as a slush fund, or really even to criticize it,” he said, apparently of his own volition.
You know who won’t be criticizing it? Trumplings.
Because money is not the biggie here. This plan is a tax gift that keeps on giving.
No Trump, no Trump hotel, no Trump bible, no Melania, no Trump kids, no Trump business, no Trump trust (pardon the contradiction in terms), no Trump bank accounts, and for all I know no Mar-A-Lago groundskeeper can be investigated by the IRS for the foreseeable future.
Dear reader, if you sense a bit of bitterness here, it’s because my baseball claim was denied.
Oh, my aim was good enough and the police probably did not say thank you enough, so there’s my rock-solid case of victimization by Big Government.
Alas. I did not demonstrate sufficient levels of soul-sucking amorality, craven greed and malicious intent to warrant Donald Trump’s cash blessings.
Next time, I’ll bring antlers.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.