Typed this up and forgot about it, or stuff that happens to Donald Trump

 

Well, things have gone to hell in an organic hand-basket here in the Vampire State, which is the norm hereabouts, just in case you did not know that, but this week has proven more norm than the week before that. A jury in the fifth-rate Gomorrah squatting at the mouth of the river that flows two ways has convicted Donald Trump, the erstwhile (or current, depending on who you talk to) President of this our Great Republic, of removing the tags from sheets, pillowcases, and mattresses at his hotels from one end of our amber waves of grain to another. This is a most shocking development, and if you are reading this in the presence of children, I would recommend that you send them out of the room quickly, lest you unwittingly corrupt their innocence forever.

The President manque cannot plead ignorance of the law; generations of Americans have known that the tags on bed linens and mattresses are inseparable from the mattress to which they are attached, and that the Federal government would fully prosecute all malefactors engaged in separating the tag from its pillow.. Sympathy for the ignorant, for the poor schnook just trying to get a good night’s sleep without that tag irritating his feet like a horsefly that keeps buzzing in his ears and won’t back off, even after the schnook’s 438^th attempt to commit blunt force trauma on the fly with a two-year old copy of Good Housekeeping magazine, is wasted on the likes of Mr. Trump, who knew what the law was and chose to play fast and loose with it (wow, you’d need a good pair of binoculars to see the verb from the subject in that sentence).

The jury was on to Mr. Trump’s desperate prevarications about those missing tags, thanks to the heroic police work of Officer S. Gregory, undercover bed inspector for the New York Police Department’s Tag Removal Squad. The Tag Removal Squad is an integral part of the NYPD’s Special Investigations Division, an elite group of detectives that investigates the city’s most sinister crimes. Officer Gregory, who plays the bass strumpet for the NYPD’s marching band when she is not prowling through the bedsheets of the Naked City looking for tag-rippers, spoon lickers, and various other members of the criminal classes, caught Mr. Trump colluding with Russian louts, thieves, and sundry other Slavic ne’er do wells to rip the tags off of the pillows at several Trump hotels in order to invalidate the warranties.  Why Mr. Trump would want to do this was not adequately explained at the trial, but the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case said that the crimes charged might have something to do with insurance fraud, unless they did not have anything to do with insurance fraud. You never can tell about these things, you know; it could be one way or another, unless you are not a Blondie fan.

NEBRASKA VS. GOD (2008): You can’t, much as you may want to, sue God, something I am sure the Lord in His infinite wisdom is almighty glad to hear. This bit of Good News comes to us all courtesy of a Nebraska judge, who tossed out said bit of legal silliness filed by an Omaha legislator who wanted God to pay up for all the trouble, terror, and other not nice things done either by Him directly or by others in His name. The judge, obviously a man of Solomonic wisdom, dismissed the case with prejudice, stating that since God had no address, the court could not serve Him with the papers necessary to inform Him that someone had filed suit against Him. Friends of the legislator, who must have a very safe seat or has decided to end his political career in spectacular if very silly fashion, countered the court’s legal reasoning, calling it specious in the extreme, pointing out that as the Lord is both ubiquitous and omniscient He has no need for a fixed address and already knows about the lawsuit without needing a process server to inform Him of that fact. Nevertheless, the wheels of justice, being essentially bureaucratic in their nature, dictate that the process server must serve the defendant, whether that defendant is the dumbass who ran his car straight into your garage door after a St. Patrick’s Day party or the Supreme Being. The state, after all, is paying the process server to serve legal paper and the state expects the process server to do something for the money, unlike, for example, the state’s expectations for the people at the department of motor vehicles, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of the island of lost souls and from whom nothing is expected except a prolonged case of agita,

Still, an appeal seems likely at this point as trial lawyers and insurance companies begin to square off for what promises to be the steel cage legal death match of the eternity. The financial stakes for the insurance companies could not be higher. For as long as there has been an insurance industry, there have been those events that we all know as acts of God, events so rare and so unlikely that that no one in their right mind, a classification that immediately eliminates most lawyers and all Red Sox fans, would expect an insurance company to write a policy on. Everyone understands that no insurance company has ever calculated your chances of having your pancreas ripped from your body and eaten raw by a gray-bearded schlirchher bird-fungus from the planet Grokklesnorp as you head off to your nearest Dunkin Donuts for your morning cup of coffee. This is just something that does not appear on any actuarial chart that I am aware of and, as far as the insurance company is concerned, not an event that they can assign a dollar amount to. Should this admittedly unlikely event occur to you or to someone you love, it would be one of those acts traditionally ascribed to the Almighty, like earthquakes, avalanches, and that little old lady who doesn’t bother to check for oncoming traffic as she makes a left turn onto a major highway, which I know is definitely an act of God from the way I screamed, Jesus Christ! I am sure if you are not a Christian you would have used the name of your conception of the Divine in vain as well. If God suddenly becomes liable for the acts traditionally ascribed to Him and the workings of His Divine Will, many insurance companies will go through the legal boilerplate on all of their contracts to make sure that none of these acts require them to part with so much as a red cent. Worse even than this, insurance industry lobbyists are already hard at work in Washington, trying to make sure that Congress does not pass legislation requiring the Almighty to take out some insurance if He wishes to continue going about His mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Wonders are all very well and good for your average insurance company, so long as they are not on the hook for the damages.

Trial lawyers, by contrast, regard the Lord and all His works as the biggest potential payday since the invention of asbestos, an event that any good lawyer will have no trouble connecting with the Almighty. Indeed, there will scarcely be a major or minor disaster anywhere in the world that the trial lawyers will not try to pin on the Lord. And given that the Lord is eternal, the number of billable hours a smart lawyer can generate will be truly astounding. Had the option been available to them, the wrongful death class action suit for the citizens of Pompeii killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. would still be winding its way through the courts, with the descendants of the original lawyers still getting rich off the case. Yes indeed, there’s nothing like a volcanically active planet with no written warning sign stating that living on this planet might be hazardous to your health to set any personal injury lawyer’s eyes aglow with a selfless desire to help the insulted and injured of this earth, and, of course, to make out like a bandit without any of the attendant risks.

SUITS, STRONG, FRIVOLOUS, AND OTHERWISE: The problem of tort reform got you down? Are you frustrated by politicians and their inability to wean themselves from campaign contributions from the tort lawyers whose livelihood even minor reform might threaten? Then have no fear, folks, help is on the way. Who needs tort reform when the judges in the case will not take you seriously, and will, in fact, make fun of you and your case in public? Yes, the answer to the need to reform the abuse of tort law is to mock the plaintiffs unmercifully until they slink away in shame and leave the justice system for those people who actually need to use it.

This comes to all of us courtesy of the good people at Opinion Journal.