On the electric teevee with Ms. Joy Reid over the weekend, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold—he of the endless legal pad, and determined spelunker into all things griftable down at Camp Runamuck—talked about an interesting development regarding Jared Kushner, the Dauphin prince of the current regime.

REID: “And let’s talk about Jared for a moment. Rather than relax the rent requirements for his tenants, and some of his tenants are in tough positions, in Maryland and other places, that they are enforcing to the maximum that they want their money. What about his income? A lot of it does come from being not the best landlord.”

FAHRENTHOLD: “I’m not the world’s expert on Jared Kushner, but I have read that. At the same time, the Kushner Company is asking for leniency from its lenders—there’s a retail space in Times Square that I’ve read they’re having trouble making the payments on. So they’re forcing others to make payments while trying to get out of it themselves.”



You know what’s great about this? This is literally a Bible story, a parable Jesus actually tells in the 18th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, right there in verses 21-35. It does not end well for the Kushner-esque character.



Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.



Alas, life does not always imitate Scripture, and the grift goes merrily on. From The Atlantic:



On March 13, President Donald Trump promised Americans they would soon be able to access a new website that would ask them about their symptoms and direct them to nearby coronavirus testing sites. He said Google was helping.

That wasn’t true. But in the following days, Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described. A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request, an Oscar spokesperson told The Atlantic. The company even dispatched two employees from New York to meet in person with federal officials in Washington, D.C., the spokesperson said. Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.

That concludes today’s service here at the Basilica of Our Lady of the Shady Bookkeeping.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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