Last Days

MONDAY, JUNE 29 This week kicks off with a long-awaited day
of reckoning for the perpetrator and beneficiary of what the New
York Times hailed as “the largest, longest, and most widespread
Ponzi scheme in history”: Bernie Madoff was sentenced today
on an array of federal crimes including securities fraud, wire fraud,
mail fraud, money laundering, perjury, and making false filings to the
SEC. Condemning Madoff’s crimes as “extraordinarily evil,” Federal
District Judge Denny Chin pointed out that no friends, family, or other
supporters had submitted any letters on Mr. Madoff’s behalf before
giving the disgraced financier the maximum sentence of 150 years in
prison. Various victims were on hand to twist the knife, including
Michael Schwartz, who said Madoff had stolen funds he’d set
aside to sustain his disabled brother and expressed hope that
“[Madoff’s] jail cell will become his coffin,” and Burt Ross,
who lost $5 million to Madoff’s fraud and cited Dante’s Divine
Comedy, sharing his dream that when Mr. Madoff
dies—”virtually unmourned”—he will find himself in the
lowest circle of hell.

TUESDAY, JUNE 30 Speaking of American sociopaths: The week
continues with Sarah Palin, the failed vice-presidential
nominee/not-yet-failed governor of Alaska (the week is young) who today
made headlines as the subject of Todd S. Purdum’s Vanity Fair profile “It Came from Wasilla,” a kaleidoscopically damning
portrait of the politician as a proudly ignorant loon with a deep
persecution complex, a hair trigger for perceived betrayal, and
shockingly little regard for what lesser people call the truth. As
countless readers were thrilled to discover, Purdum is unafraid to
broach the big subjects. Palin’s questionable political
prospects: “Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican
Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential
politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they
privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for
the vice presidency? How could John McCain, one of the cagiest
survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of
life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and
an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have
picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed
job all but disqualified him for his?” And her questionable mental
state: “More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up,
without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard.
Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted
the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—’a
pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for
admiration, and lack of empathy’—and thought it fit her
perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends
and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and
detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name
but in God’s, and signed it ‘Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.'”
Thanks to Purdum and Vanity Fair for their invaluable piece of
Palinalia—now let’s never speak of that woman again.

••Also today: The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled
unanimously that the state’s second U.S. Senate seat be filled by
Democrat Al Franken instead of Republican Norm Coleman, putting
an end to an eight-month election battle and giving Democrats a rare,
filibuster-hobbling supermajority in the Senate. Congratulations to
Senator Franken, who’s made it clear to every child in America that
making fun of Rush Limbaugh is as good a way as any to launch a
political career.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 1 Nothing happened today, unless you count
the death of Karl Malden, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning star of
A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and The
Streets of San Francisco, who passed away today at age 97, or the
horrification of Hot Tipper Super Jive, who was riding this
morning’s 271 Metro to Bellevue when she was assaulted by the sight of
a young woman assiduously scraping out her facial pores with her bus
pass.

THURSDAY, JULY 2 In much better news, today New Delhi became the first Indian city to legalize homosexuality, with the
Delhi High Court striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal
Code—created in 1861 by the British and making consensual sex
between same-sex adult partners a crime punishable by up to 10 years in
prison—as a violation of fundamental rights. As New Delhi’s NDTV
reports, today’s repeal of Section 377 will also mean changes in New
Delhi’s civil laws pertaining to inheritance, property, and adoption.
Hurrah and onward.

FRIDAY, JULY 3 Today brings Sarah Palin’s cuckoo, wacko
freak-out on national television, 18 rambling minutes of Alaskan
flattery, persecution paranoia, tortured sports metaphors, junior-high
journaling, and random lip-flappings that ultimately communicated
Palin’s abrupt resignation as Alaska’s governor. The closest thing
Palin gave to a reason for quitting: the
Democrat-and-liberal-media-fueled “politics of personal
destruction“—a rich allegation from a politician who had no
trouble charging Barack Obama with “pallin’ around with terrorists”
while straining to bury all evidence of her family’s extensive
connections to the secession-seeking Alaska Independence Party. But as
today made clear, expecting constancy or even sanity from Palin is a
fool’s game. Whatever she does next, it will be highly mockable and
lightly terrifying.

SATURDAY, JULY 4 The week continues with Independence Day,
which we’ll celebrate by acknowledging the seven ballistic
missiles fired off the eastern coast of North Korea today. “Our
military is fully ready to counter any North Korean threats and
provocations,” stated the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Happy birthday, USA,
and back the fuck off, North Korea.

SUNDAY, JULY 5 And now for an update on the revolution in
Iran, with this weekend bringing what an Iranian scholar called
“the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic.” The
Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, an influential group of
Iranian religious leaders, yesterday denounced the country’s disputed
presidential election and new government as illegitimate,
directly defying the “supreme authority” of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As
the New York Times reports, “The announcement came on a day when
[favored presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi] released
documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s
supporters… [accusing them] of printing more than 20 million extra
ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.”
Meanwhile, a “close associate” of the supreme leader denounced would-be
president-elect Moussavi as a “foreign agent” who should be treated as
a criminal. Stay tuned.

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