The Ignoble Former Duke of York

There was a wee bit of elite accountability yesterday, with Andrew Mountbatten getting arrested for the crime of sharing British government secrets with other pervs in Epstein world. As was widely remarked yesterday, it seems like a lot of countries other than the US are able to prosecute elites who commit crimes, unlike the best country in the world.

Anyway, a couple of things about this.

First, someday we’ll stop pretending that there’s not a huge amount of child rape going on. I know someone who works in mental health, and she tells me that the chances of one of her patients having been sexually molested are pretty high. In the mental health community, it’s widely understood that child rape is a common act that destroys lives. Most of it is perpetrated by other family members, but guys like the guy formerly known as Prince Andrew are depressingly prevalent. In my little red hometown when I was growing up, it was widely known that an older man preyed on young boys. He finally went to prison after years and years of raping boys. (After he got out of prison, my dad saved his life by driving him to the hospital — he was having a heart attack during a house call — then running a code on him. I told my old man he should have taken the long way to the hospital.)

Second, the era of elite non-accountability has been a long time coming. I’ll give Republicans 75% of the blame and Democrats 25% of the blame.

Republicans set the stage with the Nixon pardon, but I’d argue that the Clinton impeachment was their act that was a real turning point. It was mainly tit-for-tat retribution for Nixon’s almost-impeachment, but one of the side effects was to trivialize the impeachment power. The many Republican pardons before and after the Clinton impeachment didn’t help. Republicans have been helping elites avoid consequences for decades — the Trump Administration is just the final stop on a long train ride towards the collapse of all of our institutions that are supposed to give elites the same measure of justice that, say, a young drug dealer gets.

The Democratic 25% is a combination of a few suspect pardons (like Clinton’s pardon of Mark Rich) plus doing very little to make the Department of Justice pursue cases against elites. Merrick Garland’s tenure at the DoJ is a case in point. From what I’ve read, a lot of the DoJ’s inertia is related to their desire to have slam-dunk cases, and their fear of filing cases where they might lose. Welp, elites have a lot of expensive lawyers, so most cases against elites aren’t going to be slam dunks.

One more thing: there’s going to be a lot of (correct) commentary about Andrew being a sacrificial lamb for the British elite. British elites are, I’m sure, hoping that prosecuting Randy Andy will serve to quell the popular cry for Epstein associate scalps. This may well be true, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. At least they’re prosecuting someone in England For the elite, if some of their ilk experience some consequences, that’s huge. They think they’re untouchable. The more pictures of them in the back of cop cars, the better. Baby steps.