Louisiana Voice

Jeffrey Epstein is dead, a suicide.

It should have never happened.

He previously had attempted suicide in his jail cell and had been placed on suicide watch.

Why was he taken off that watch? That’s the question someone is going to have to answer.

No matter what ultimate facts surface in answer to that question, one thing is for certain and you can bet the farm on it: the conspiracy theorists are going to be swarming like a fire ant bed run over by a lawn mower.

In fact, they already are with none other than Donald J. Trump front and center with his TWEETS implicating the Clintons. Another contributor to what is certain to become a cottage industry, Lynn Patton, who works for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, tweeted that Epstein had been “Hillary’d!!”

Of course, it’s common knowledge that Epstein and Bill Clinton were pals. Bill even flew in Epstein’s private jet. There’s no escaping that fact and no one is denying it.

Trump’s more rabid supporters, however, will pounce on this fact as some kind of validation of their theory that the Clintons had Epstein murdered and they will cling to that absurdity to the bitter end while at the same time dismissing credible reports from U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia did in fact intervene in the 2016 election, that it was all a “hoax,” “fake news.”

They will trumpet the Clinton “conspiracy” to eliminate Epstein while continuing to deny any possibility of Trump collusion with Russia or of any obstruction of justice on their hero’s part.

They will also overlook all the connections between Epstein and Trump first revealed HERE three years ago and AGAIN just last month.

If Trump’s supporters want a conspiracy theory, they may wish to review the Jeffrey Epstein-Alexander Acosta-Steven Hoffenberg-Donald Trump connection in an effort to untangle that little knot.

It was Acosta, you may remember, who was the Miami U.S. attorney who engineered that nifty little plea bargain for Epstein in 2008 in which the pedophile received a sentence of only 13 months in jail for running his underage sex ring but was allowed to leave the jail each day to go to his office to work while spending only his nights in the jail cell.

And it was Trump who plucked Acosta to be his secretary of labor until Acosta resigned when the heat became a little too intense.

And Hoffenberg? He was Epstein’s partner in a gigantic Ponzi scheme (the biggest on record until Bernie Madoff came along) and it was Hoffenberg who, after getting out of prison for that escapade, established a super PAC in 2016 and pledged $50 million of his own money on behalf of candidate….Trump.

In fact, the one common thread in all of this appears to be….Donald Trump.

Yet it was Hillary, the conspiracy nuts said, who ran a pedophile sex ring out of a Washington pizza parlor. This is the mentality we’re dealing with here.

With all these Epstein connections firmly established in the record—not a conspiracy—it seems rather curious that Trump would wade in with his tweets pushing a Clinton conspiracy in Epstein’s death. It might seem to make sense that Trump would prefer to back away from the whole sordid mess and try to let it blow over.

But that’s not his way because rationale has never been his strong suit.

So, if it’s conspiracies one wants, there seems to be plenty to go around with these four men’s association with each other.

But my guess is the newest Clinton conspiracy will “trump” those.

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A dear friend says that Donald Trump is “100% responsible” for the latest shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

It’s difficult to disagree with him.

Yes, we had mass shootings before Trump: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Colorado come to mind.

But they were random acts aimed at everyone in general and no one in particular.

But now we have the Pulse shooting in Orlando, the African-American church shooting in Charleston, S.C., Charlottesville, Virginia, among others, that were directed at specific groups: gays, blacks, and Hispanics. There were even pipe bombs sent to Trump critics.

Yes, there are still random mass shootings, like the one in Las Vegas, but a disturbing trend seems to be toward white nationalists trying to take out as many minorities as possible in the shortest time possible.

As another friend observed, assault weapons are more efficient than nooses with these monsters.

I’ve said my piece about taking these assault weapons out of circulation, so I won’t belabor the point. But these mentally deranged people are taking their cue from the top—and that’s Trump. His rhetoric, from ridiculing a physically handicapped reporter in 2016, to belittling women, to encouraging crowds to rough up protesters and leading them in chants encouraging violence.

That has to stop. Trump doesn’t seem to understand that words and actions, especially those of POTUS, have consequences—or he just doesn’t care.

First of all, that kind of nonsense should be beneath the dignity of the president. His stooping to such levels gives him the appearance of a fourth-grade bully taunting other kids on the playground. That is not what this country needs, though you wouldn’t know it from his base.

I’ve been accused of having some affliction called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but those women, I will suggest emphatically, do not represent the country I grew up in and sadly, neither does our president.

How is it that we could come to this land, inflict genocide an entire civilization already living here and assume that it’s somehow our land by wearing something so flagrantly racist?

Another friend forward the following to me:

When you speak of Trump Derangement Syndrome, are you referring to his supporters or to his critics?

OK, so who’s deranged…..the people speaking out against hate speech and racism—or those who are defending it?

Who’s deranged……the people stuffing children into overcrowded cages—or those who are exposing it?

Who’s deranged……the people who expose the president’s lies everyday—or those who make excuses for it?

Who’s deranged……the people who are investigating Russian interference in our election—or those who call it a witch hunt?

Who’s deranged…..the people who recognize the importance of dealing with climate change—or those who call it a hoax?

Who’s deranged……those who honor our war heroes and POWs—or those who prefer soldiers who weren’t captured?

Who’s deranged…..those who believe that a businessman who built his fortune by cheating working people, lost a billion dollars in ten years and never performed even one day of public service has their best interests in mind—or those who see a con-man?

OK, it’s up to you. Who’s deranged?

(I’m informed the image of the women wearing “Make America White Again” T-shirts was photo-shopped and not authentic. Accordingly, I have removed it—with apologies.)

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Johnny Armstrong and I will be at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs Saturday at 2 p.m. to sign copies of our books.

Armstrong, like me, is a native of Ruston and he has written a delightful conservation-themed novel entitled Shadow Shine. The book is receiving excellent reviews from editors and bookstore owners alike. It’s about a cooperative effort by the forest animals to save their environment from the destructive forces of man. The hero of the story is a possum who isn’t aware he is a possum.

His adventures as he traverses foreign territory is a fast-paced read and the book far exceeds the usual first-novel by an author.

I will be there signing my new book, Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption. As the title suggests, the book is about corrupt, unethical sheriffs in about three dozen Louisiana parishes who run their personal fiefdoms like the dictator many feel they have become—like the sheriff who was leasing a marina from his own company for $1700 per month until the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico at which point the sheriff sub-let the marina to BP as a staging area for the spill recovery at $1.1 million per month.

Cavalier House is in the Denham Springs Antique Village and is run by John and Michelle Cavalier, a busy, civic-minded couple who have made the concept of independent book stores a viable business and a local attraction to readers from all around.

If you can’t be there, you can order the book from me (and I’ll sign it) for $30 by clicking on the yellow

button in the column to the right of this post. Or you may mail a check for $30 to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727.

Shifting gears a little, I was in Alexandria on Tuesday for a book signing and got a most pleasant surprise.

First, a brief background story to put Tuesday’s events in context.

I grew up in the only house on Fielding Drive in Ruston. After my grandfather died in 1971, my grandmother moved in with her youngest son, my uncle, in Monroe and we rented the house out to Louisiana Tech students.

Fast forward to last Tuesday and a gentleman named Mike Mikell approached the desk where I was setting up my books and said, “I have something to show you.” Mikell, who holds an engineering degree from Tech, held out a thin book that I didn’t immediately recognize because it was hard-bound. He opened the book to reveal the cover of a paperback book entitled Bonnie and Clyde that I had written 50 years ago this year about the outlaws who terrorized the Southwest during the 1930s. The book was adapted from a series of articles I had written for the Ruston Daily Leader when I was a wet-nosed reporter there. The writing project was undertaken to coincide with the Warren Beatty-Faye Dunaway movie of the same name that was showing in theaters across the U.S. Here’s a PHOTO of the two of us with the old and new books. The picture is sideways because I haven’t figured out how to rotate the image and make it stay that way.

The Ruston Daily Leader was the first paper in the nation to report the 1934 ambush and death of the pair in neighboring Bienville Parish, just 20 miles west of Ruston. The ambush by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer occurred just before the Leader‘s deadline but after the deadlines of other afternoon newspapers.

“I lived in your old house on Fielding Drive while I attended Louisiana Tech,” Mikell explained. “I found this book in the house and when I heard you were going to be here today, I just had to come here and show you this.” The book had been bound, probably by a library that stocked the book 50 years ago. “I want one of your sheriffs books and I would like you to sign both books,” he said.

I was honored to do so.

“A lot happened on Fielding Drive when I was living there,” he said. “The concept of drive-thru daiquiris was born in that house. My roommate David “Tater” Ervin opened the very first one in the state and he dreamed up the idea while were were living in your house. We kicked around a lot of ideas to make money while we played chess there.”

While Mikell has his memories of that house, I have my own. That’s the house where I was brought as an 18-month-old malnourished infant after my grandfather rescued me from a hospital in Galveston, Texas, where I had been abandoned by my mother.

We were poor, very poor. But what we lacked in financial resources was more than made up for in love and caring given me by my grandparents. My grandfather drilled into my head and heart that if something is not altogether right, “then, by God, it’s altogether wrong.” He lived by a code that every living being is to be treated with respect and dignity and that everyone you meet is a potential friend until they prove that they don’t want to be.

Once, when I accompanied him to the Ruston Feed Mill to get feed for his cattle, he met a man on the loading dock and stood talking to him for nearly an hour. On the way home, he said, “That man back there is a liar and a thief.” Unable to wrap my young brain around his congeniality toward the man, I asked, “Why were you friends with him if he’s a liar and a thief?”

He stopped and pulled to the side of the road and turned to me. Pointing a finger at me, he said, “Son, you can be friends with anybody as long as you know who they are.”

That was a sixth-grade education unloading some deep psychology—and a powerful life lesson—on me and I’ve never forgotten that.

Something else I’ve never forgotten. He bought me a candy bar once and on the way home, I unwrapped and threw the wrapper out the window. He never said a word but I felt a pop on the back of my head and I saw Jesus waving me to the light. To this day, I will not throw so much as a gum wrapper out of my vehicle.

Yes, Mike Mikell, Fielding Drive did indeed possess some wonderful memories and I cherish them to this day.

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Some things you just can’t help wondering about.

Take President Barack Obama, for example. He once threatened to withhold recovery aid to Louisiana flood victims because the state had done little to protect flood-prone areas of the state. At the same time, he managed to insult flood victims who built their homes in low-lying areas as deserving of their fate.

But nine months after his diatribe aimed at the state and its residents, he offered the America’s resources to aid an adversarial nation in its battle with widespread flooding. Obama confirmed that he had spoken to the leader of a sworn enemy of the U.S. and “expressed concern over the vast flooding that covered 30,000 square kilometers” in Russia.

Obama’s double standard sparked immediate outrage among Republicans and evangelicals with religious leaders calling down God’s wrath on the president and Republican leaders in congress calling for his immediate impeachment.

Oh, wait. Sorry, wrong president. My bad.

After further review, it turns out it was Donald Trump, aka President Stone Spurs who last November threatened to WITHHOLD FEDERAL FUNDS from the state of California which experienced the most destructive forest fires in the state’s history and which killed 11 people. He issued his threat while accusing California of “gross mismanagement of its forests.” He later suggested California could do a better job of preventing fires by RAKING ITS FORESTS, which prompted these editorial cartoons:

RAKING FORESTS

But then yesterday (July 31), it was learned—and confirmed by the White House—that President Bone Spurs had offered U.S. assistance in combating forest fires raging over 30,000 square kilometers in the eastern parts of Russia and that Bone Spurs had “expressed concern over the vast wildfires afflicting Siberia.”

And Republicans and evangelicals said nary a word. Republicans and evangelicals who, I might add, once constituted the core of the John Birch Society, that pillar of anti-communism.

Republicans and evangelicals who 50 years ago, were running around screaming at the top of their lungs to anyone who would listen about how fluoridation of water to fight tooth decay was an insidious communist plot.

Nary a word from any of those.

Not even Sens. Cornpone Kennedy or David…er, Bill Cassidy.

So, help me out here: which country was it Bone Spurs said he was going to make great again?

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