Remorse

I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. Please forgive me.

I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong but I must have done something wrong, so I apologize.

This is important because, as I’ve said many a time before, almost no one apologizes until they get caught. Before that, they’re not sorry so the apologies don’t exactly seem sincere.

I’ve been thinking about this because of the recent brouhaha over racist comments by Los Angeles City Council members who somehow got recorded saying them.

They weren’t sorry before the recordings surfaced. They’ve apologized now.

Sigh.

There are other things to wonder about. For example, are there only three racist City Council members? How about all the other guys who haven’t been secretly recorded? What are they getting away with? Why haven’t they apologized?

You know there must be at least one undiscovered racist scoring points condemning the racists who got caught.

It’s kind of a Schrodinger’s cat situation — a politician is simultaneously racist/corrupt and loving/honest until secretly recorded.

How are we supposed to know whom to vote for if we can’t know what they’re really like?

Politics is mostly about branding and public perception. It shouldn’t be.

The obvious fix for this is to record all politicians all the time. As soon as someone declares their candidacy, they must be strapped to a tracker and followed by drones. The bathroom stuff will be embarrassing, but we’re talking about saving democracy.

There is a problem here. A candidate could be racist before being monitored and then just pretend for the cameras afterward. Intense scrutiny of yearbooks and Facebook could help with this but some racists will slip through.

The only real solution is to require apologies in advance from everyone. Then we can stop worrying.

Him again? What has Hunter Biden not done? He has the world’s most famous laptop and, apparently, he’s tied to schemes everywhere.

(Side note to Hunter: You should auction that laptop off at Sotheby’s. Someone will pay a fortune for it, and you can use that money to buy a social media company. It’s the trendy thing to do.)

I bring this up because I found a surprise in a New York federal judge’s ruling on a motion last week in an odd case in which a bank and a city in Kazakhstan sued a former bank president and a former city mayor.

I assume this really happened, but it does sound an awful lot like a Borat subplot. You can decide for yourself whether the court is being punked.

The motion the judge dealt with last week was a request for the judge to strike a bunch of topics from the defendants’ list of deposition subjects. It was quite a long list and, as it turned out, kind of balanced politically.

Toward the top was “evidence supporting Almaty’s claim that the Sater Defendants (or any of them) received funds belonging to Almaty in connection to the Trump SoHo Scheme.”

Toward the bottom was “Kenes Rakishev’s relationship with Vladimir Putin” and “Kenes Rakishev’s relationship with Hunter Biden.”

Christopher Steele and the FBI make appearances on the list too. You can’t go wrong with all the greatest hits.

The judge, though, issued a protective order. My guess is that she was protecting her own sanity.

Categories / Op-Ed