Forget the presumed "client list"

The ugly truth is that Epstein is us!

Okay, okay, kids. Stop your whining.

If you promise to shut up once I’m done effusing and hyperventilating, I will explain the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco in a manner that truly satisfies every one and no one of you.

Then you can get back to enjoying your hot new edition of Donkey Kong Bananza.

Everybody knows who Jeffrey Epstein is, including the grizzled 78-year-old draft evader from the Vietnam War who just emerged from his cave high in a very remote part of the Colorado Rockies for the first time in 56 years and learned that 8-track audio tapes had been replaced by something known as “.mp3 files” on the even weirder thingamajig his local contacts refer to as “The Internet”.

Amid the ensuing psychological trauma he heard that a very dead guy named “Epstein” was catastrophically upending the global order of things.

According to our own confidential government source, the former recluse is being detained and interrogated as a possible material witness to the deep-state’s deep-sixing of the Epstein client list.

But that’s immaterial at this point.

What matters is that even if we don’t have the list yet to display for future generations in the “Conspiracies Have Consequences” section of the Smithsonian, we finally know the truth.

Or at minimum the “post-truth” truthiness of the half-true, sorta, kinda “truth” of it all – namely…

…That Epstein was a very brilliant, extremely successful, uncannily manipulative, totally depraved hustler of the rich and famous.

And?

Sorry, kids, nothing comes after the conjunction. That’s it.

I’m serious.

Such an epiphany came to me the past week as I was flying across the pond on the way back from a European junket and elected to fill in several of the long, nine hours in a cramped plane seat watching the docuseries about the African American megamogul known as Sean “Diddy” Combs.

The docuseries is entitled “The Fall of Diddy”.

You know Diddy. He launched his career under the moniker of “Puff Diddy” aka “P. Diddy”. He’s the guy who almost single-handedly created the hip-hop industry.

After a scandal or two that sobriquet began to damage the brand, so he started calling himself something that actually resembled his given name Sean “Diddy” Combs”.

The promo for the series, which first aired last winter in the runup to Diddy’s trial, makes you realize Epstein’s world wasn’t much different from Diddy’s, with the exception one was white and one was black.

Here’s what the promo says:

“The Fall of Diddy” takes viewers on a journey through Combs’ meteoric rise as one of the most influential figures in music and pop culture, from his beginnings as a talented creative mind to his 2024 arrest that shocked the industry. The series combines exclusive, never-before-heard accounts with rare archival footage, offering intimate insights into the troubling allegations that have emerged over the years. The docuseries doesn’t shy away from addressing the disturbing claims of sexual assault, abusive behavior, and violence that have followed Combs throughout his career. Featuring testimonies from individuals with personal connections to the events, “

Then the punchline:

As the series airs, it forces audiences to grapple with uncomfortable questions about accountability and the intersection of fame, power, and abuse. While Combs’ contributions to music and culture are indisputable, “The Fall of Diddy” challenges viewers to confront the darker realities that often go unnoticed in the pursuit of success.

Those “darker realities” are analogous to thousands of termites gnawing through the house frame behind the walls about which the homeowner methodically strives to remain clueless.

Epstein’s “friends” were often political – people we enthusiastically voted for. Diddy’s were mainly from showbiz – every teenager’s hero and heartthrob.

But all turned out to be celebs, soon-to-be celebs, celeb wanna-be’s, and celeb groupies and hangers on who were all overcome by the glitz.

And the sex.

And the drugs.

And the depraved lifestyle in general, about which they were in some cases quite ambivalent, but deemed unavoidable if they were to follow through with their own tantalizing dreams of stardom and glory.

The dark side, as it turns out, didn’t matter. Only the personal mind trip did.

Both Epstein and Diddy had sitting presidents at different times in their retinues. Epstein palled around with Clinton, Diddy with Obama.

Trump moved in the same social circles as Epstein long before he became President. But as the Washington Post – not exactly a MAGA apologist - noted recently, “there is no public evidence of inappropriate behavior by Trump related to Epstein.“

That judgment, of course, has not in any palpable way prevented the ravenous anti-Trump media minions from straining gnats in the hope of producing a camel to “prove” that our current President really was part of the deep-state conspiracy that MAGA itself now seems to believe he is helping cover up.

There is the Wall Street Journal “revelation” that Trump sent Epstein a naughty birthday letter in 2003, which exposes as much about his collusion with the deep state as his 2016 Access Hollywood videotape.

The comes the New York Times “hit-piece” that one of Epstein’s accusers in 1996 alleged that Trump in an ephemeral one-off had a lecherous look at her legs.

And naturally the very same piece with its clickbait headline “An Accuser’s Story Suggests How Trump Might Appear in the Epstein Files” proceeds to bury in the fifth paragraph like a lump of cat poo in Garfield’s litterbox the modest disclaimer that the same person recently told federal investigators “she had no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Epstein’s associates”, including our sitting President.

In light of these lurid “exposés”, I find myself now losing sleep over the prospect that the New York press corps might easily diassemble my own career by unearthing and publishing the scatological poem I wrote as a seventh-grader in Mr. Stinson’s science class while he was trying to explain how a toilet flushes.

It should be emphasized, however, that none of this mitigates the monstrous iniquity of Epstein’s criminal empire, about which a Noah-like flood of credible evidence unambiguously attests.

In our collective saturnalia of political reprobation, recrimination, and guilt by association in regard to everything Epstein are we possibly turning a blind eye to the sordid underside of haut monde pop culture that virtually everyone of us continues to pump prime and puff up generation after generation?

Jeffrey Epstein was simply a genius at monetizing the kind of moral muck that both Republicans and Democrats secretly salivate after. He didn’t need the rumored torrent of Mossad or CIA or Russian intelligence cash libations to achieve the ill-gotten gain and bad boy reputation that stuck with him like the aroma of overripe kimchi year after year.

He knew how to pump prime us as well.

Consider the following headlines just in the last two months from the New York Times alone:

• “A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet”

• “U.K. Announces Rapid Review Into Scale of Child Sexual Abuse by Grooming Gangs”

• “20 Arrested Over Network That Distributed Child Sex Abuse Material, Interpol Says”

• “Authorities Rescue Girl Whose Mother Livestreamed Her Sexual Abuse”

That doesn’t even include the now almost daily disclosures about routine sexual abuse on the part of clergy, teachers, counselors, and once revered professional role models for young people.

Sex trafficking of women and children, of which both Epstein and Diddy were accused, has been a burgeoning planetary scourge for decades now, according to a report by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Yet between 2019 and 2022 it spiked by 31 percent, with a 38 percent rise for young girls.

Various international organizations estimate that on an international scale there are currently anywhere from 6-9 million persons, most of whom consist of women and young girls, in sexual slavery.

Furthermore, there is an accelerating and expanding market for ever more victims of sexual exploitation, not just “over there” but right here.

And we obsess about Epstein?

It really is immaterial if our preferred - or reviled - celebrity political personality rubbed shoulders, or partied all night, with Epstein at one of his satanic soirees.

Here’s the very real, ugly truth.

Epstein is us!

And regardless of whether the Epstein “client list” is suddenly retrieved from the dumpster in the back alley behind the DOJ building in DC, or eventually released at a press conference with regal fanfare, or continues to glisten in the fevered imaginations of both MAGA zealots and Democratic oppo scuzz artists, that very real, overly ugly truth will only grow uglier and uglier in the days to come.