CSI: American Carnage (Sunday, September 1, 2019)
NEW YORK – The Post guy pushes into the Subway Inn on Second Avenue, sees the Times guy on a stool at the bar and sits right down next to him. Hey! says the Times guy, haven’t seen you! What do you think of the place? The Post guy orders a BrewDog, looks around, and says, Langan’s was better; Gough’s was best. This place, you can’t just move a bar a couple of blocks and carry on like nothing’s different, okay? My opinion. The Times guy toasts him and says, And entitled to it. Cheers. They clink glasses and down their beers. The Times guy says, Barkeep! Two more. He turns to his friend. The Times guy says, I’m thinking I’m gonna pitch a new column to The Eds. The Post guy says, really? On what? The Eds are pretty tough. The Times guy says, Okay. Here it is: Grifter of the Week. What do you think? The Post guy says, No way. The Times guy says, What do you mean? We’re gonna have to dig, but there’s enough material, I think. The Post guy says, That’s the point. More than enough material. You’ll be swamped, so to say. The Times guy says, Point taken. What about Grifter of the Day? The Post guy says, For the medium grifts. The smallish ones. The Times guy says, Yeah, or maybe, since this is the age of the 24/7 internet-cable news cycle, maybe Grifter of the Hour? That way you could have plenty of room for the little grifts, the small ones, the ones easily swept under the rug for a few million. The Post guy ruminates. Yeah, the ones that get lost, like Brad’s latest. The Times guy says, Refresh my memory. The Post guy says Brad’s Red State Data and Digital got paid a million bucks by America First Action. So you got the president’s big election super PAC paying the company owned by the president’s campaign manager. The Times guy says, Yeah, I saw that. Looks to me like Red State is just an agent of America First, so they’re basically paying themselves. The Post guy says, In the old days, the FEC would look into this kind of scam. Brad’s the campaign manager, he’s prohibited from dealing with the PAC. The Times guy says, Brad’s wife’s name is on the fed paperwork. Anyway, Mitch and Donald have beached the FEC – no quorum. No quorum means no agency action. So I guess Brad’s in the clear. The Post guy says, Of course that’s small potatoes. The Times guy says, Even a small potato can make a french fry. The Post guy says, Problem is look at the massive grifts. They’re coming in like daily ICBMs. Look that at the opportunity zone grift you all reported today. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re talking Donald, Jared, the Mooch, Chris, LeFrak, all the big real estate operators, hedge fund guys, Cooperman, the Kohl chain dude, I mean there’s a grift so big, it makes Brad seem quaint. The Times guy, Okay, you’re right. So we enter all the grifts into a data base and run a competition for Grift of the Year. We have a big event, everybody comes. The Post guy says, The problem with that is that everybody has either helped themselves too, or they’ve enabled the grift. We are looking at a vast Crowd of the Implicated. The Times guy finishes his beer. He says, We’re all fucked. The Post guy says, We just keep doing what we’re doing, plugging away. They sit. The Times guy says, Donald will be pissed if he doesn’t win our contest. The Post guy says, Brad better watch his ass. — Sunday, September 1, 2019