The Stone in the National Shoe

 Forty months is OK; 400 months would not have been excessive. The Don is foaming and frothing about injustice and other things the terrible government does to his friends. In the end, he’ll pardon Roger Stone if Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh can’t find some other reason to let him go.
 But, as Judge Amy Berman Jackson said, “The truth still exists. The truth still matters.”  She apparently was unimpressed by Stone, his hot and cold running lawyers and his low-life friends. As am I.
 From Judge Jackson’s reputation, 40 months is probably about what she would have given him  even if The Don’s consigliere in the Justice Department had let stand the original prosecutors’ recommendation of seven to nine years. The whole pre-sentencing flap proved that Attorney General William Barr is not as smart as he is reputed to be, and their mutual buddy The Don has a bad attitude toward justice. It probably didn't change the sentence.
 (The Don, by the way is Air Force One jetting his way around the West Coast and staying in hotels with his name on them. There, as The Washington Post found, is where he can charge the taxpayers up to $600 a night for his Secret Service bodyguards he warrant office with the nuclear codes football and assorted presidential hangers on. Donald Jr. will kvell when he sees the billing records.)


  I have a history with Stone. So do a couple million other scribes and scribe types whose misfortune was to land on his email list. He has periods of hibernation, but when he is active he sends emails on a rat-a-tat basis, touting books he never bothered to research and events you wouldn’t go to in disguise. At one point, he hired a publicist to do publicity about Roger Stone, although the only thing Roger Stone ever did was publicize Roger Stone. Then multiple emails started coming.
 I had been blowing them out as fast as they came, but they got so thick underfoot that I replied, “unsubscribe me.” I kept getting them. So I wrote a longer letter, explaining how to take my name out of their email group. Nothing. So I asked why they didn’t take me off their list, and the smarmy publicist for the publicist wrote back that it was because I needed to see Roger Stone’s wisdom. I threatened to come down to Fort Lauderdale and personally kneecap Stone. They kept coming.
 Of course, I didn’t kneecap him. I found out how to block him and send his emails straight to trash. That worked -- until they started coming in again from different email accounts: FreeRogerStone and PardonRogerStone.
  Roger Stone does not have truth in him, and he doesn’t care. He would like to think of himself as a prankster to the stars, but a) he isn’t funny, b) some of his pranks have been flagrantly illegal, and c) his activities since his days with Richard M. Nixon have tended to undermine the Constitution and normalize mendacity. That’s the mendacity The Don defends with his Tweets.
   Judge Jackson had something I agree with to say about that, too: “The dismay and the disgust at the attempts by others to defend his actions as just business as usual in our polarized climate should transcend party.”
 Of course, it hasn’t and apparently won’t. But the fact remains: Stone was sentenced to more than three years for lying to congressional investigators and threatening witnesses. The Don may  not see anything wrong with lying and witness tampering. Judge Jackson and I do.