Don't get me wrong. I am just as happy as anyone else to have a day off work. And my love for this nation because of its founding principles is unsurpassed.
But I have always had a big problem with there being a national holiday called Presidents Day. I even published a piece about it seventeen years ago, in which I summed up my problem by saying that "carelessly lumping all presidents together for a generic third-Monday holiday...places the corrupt alongside the honorable, the cowardly alongside the brave, the inept alongside the able - and makes absolutely no distinction between them."
While that problem itself remains the same, its magnitude has grown exponentially worse due to: 1] the weirdly hagiographic way many partisans fawn over two of the three presidents we have since experienced, along with 2] the creepily puppeteered nature of the other president we've since experienced (obviously, Biden).
At this particular moment, the magnitude of the problem feels existential thanks to the seemingly infinite tentacles of the Epstein files. As we incrementally receive each drip and drab of evidence of evil within them, it becomes clearer and clearer that people with power and influence can never be trusted.
That should have already been obvious to people who share my conservative worldview, seeing as how that worldview is predicated on the belief that all humans are sinful by nature, that power inherently corrupts, and that humans with power must therefore be subject to checks and balances and treated without favor.
What has me particularly troubled is how many people who share that worldview - people who, I repeat, should know better - are turning out to be just as willfully blind as ideological liberals when it comes to overlooking sins committed by those on "our" side.
The evil we are seeing in the Epstein files - and make no mistake, it is evil - is bipartisan, both domestically and internationally. As a Republican, I understand the knee-jerk irritation over YouTube thumbnails about Epstein showing so many images of Donald Trump, despite the fact that what we've seen in the files supports his consistent claim to have severed ties with Epstein years ago. And as a defender of Western civilization, I understand the knee-jerk irritation over YouTube thumbnails about Epstein showing so many images of Benjamin Netanyahu without showing any of Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.
But if anyone allows the jerking of his knees to guide the direction of his eyes, he inevitably won't see many of the things that are right there in front of him and need to be seen.
The latest doc dump in the Epstein files contains more than three million documents and I am not here to insult your intelligence by pretending to have seen them all. But from what I do know, they not only confirm what we already suspected in terms of child sex trafficking and upper crust bacchanalia, they also contain strong indications of orchestrated cannibalism.
Let that sink in.
Orchestrated. Cannibalism. Strong indications of.
Child. Sex Trafficking. Confirmed.
The stuff in the files causes claims that once would have been dismissed as crackpot paranoia to suddenly become credible. Politicians, celebrities, and tycoons from all over the world appear in the files. Though we cannot tell how much each of them knew or to what extent each was involved, they are all there.
You may be asking what this has to do with the third Monday of February being set aside as a U.S. holiday called Presidents Day? Well, if we date the beginning of the Epstein scandal only to the infamous "sweetheart deal" he received from the U.S. Department of Justice, the cold hard fact is that it stretches to six presidential terms and four presidents, two of whom are Democrats and two of whom are Republicans.
Sure, it's tempting for those of us who vote GOP to point out that a fifth president is both a Democrat and by far the most implicated POTUS in the documents... Admittedly, I just did point that out, which at face value makes the "score" three Democrats to two Republicans... But why should anyone care, when what really matters is that the fingerprints of both parties are on the files and, if we insist on focusing simply on presidents, no matter how tangentially tied they may be, we're now talking about every president who has occupied the Oval Office for the past thirty-three years.
When it comes to our current president, the problem is: 1] Trump made releasing the Epstein files a big part of his 2024 campaign, then backtracked after taking office; 2] Trump's attorney general claimed to have Epstein's "client list" on her desk ready to release, then didn't release it, then said there really wasn't a "list," then released but a piddling and oft-redacted fraction of the files, which we all know is "the list" for all intents and purposes; and 3] Trump's deputy attorney general claimed there was nothing in said files that could be used to bring charges against anybody, even though any sentient human with half a brain will immediately know that claim is utter bullshit as soon as he starts perusing said files.
Flip the table around. If this happened under a Democrat administration, we would be screaming for heads to roll and probably calling the POTUS unfit for office.
If we believe what we say we believe, we cannot give the current administration a pass simply because the man at its head received our vote 468 days ago.
We can be thankful for Trump green-lighting the destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons facilities without accepting, as a "cost of doing business," his culpability in allowing pedophile slavers to slip away from justice.
If it's about principles and not persons, we have to stand up for the principle at hand regardless of the person who's in the Klieg lights. This goes for our political foes as well as our political allies, and it shouldn't be hard to do.
If we conservatives can't pull it off, it means we are susceptible to cults of personality and must stop pretending like that susceptibility is a purely left wing phenomenon.
And if we are susceptible to cults of personality, then we - this time meaning liberals, conservatives, centrists, and apoliticals alike - ought not have a holiday that indiscriminately celebrates heads of government.
