¶ One of the victims of Daren Palmer’s Ponzi scheme seems to want it known that she was ripped off by a nicer sort of thief: Bernard Madoff was probably not the sort of man to get down on his knees and clean sanctuary floors. Her point goes to the heart of affinity fraud; Mr Madoff’s victims would have had a number of unflattering names for such a guy, and “neighborly” would not be among them. ¶ Call us cynics, but we’re not nearly as interested in right and wrong as we are in political viability (the alternative to which is the wrongest wrong of them all, social or political breakdown), so we’ll be watching to see whether Michael Bloomberg’s emphatic endorsement of same-sex marriage achieves its intended effect, which will have more to do with the mayor’s personal patronage — he is a generous political contributor, after all — than with his bully pulpit in City Hall. If this mayor’s efforts fail to bring about marriage equality in New York State, our conviction that political progressives don’t know what they’re doing will plumb new depths. ¶ From our deep reading in the history of the so-called Dark Ages we have found few barbarities to compare with the American treatment of recreational drugs and drug addiction. In the evitable museum that will be erected to remind us of our benightedness, we hope that prominent display will be made available for the children’s coloring books into which solutions of the addiction-treatment drug Suboxone have been painted. We’d be sorry to see them cluttering a museum of American ingenuity.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 10:30 am.