Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

He Did What??!!...

The only trouble with the conspiracy theory that hundreds of prominent and powerful people wanted Jeffrey Epstein dead is that Jeffrey Epstein might have wanted Jeffrey Epstein dead even more than they did. But that’s mere conjecture. His mind is beyond being read. Of course, the evidence of his alleged crimes didn’t die — the “meticulous” records he kept live on, along with the names of Mr. Epstein’s patrons, clients, marks, however you might classify the celebs drawn into the pulsating estrogenic bubble of his life, humming that old tune “Thank Heaven for Little Girls….”

I’m a little surprised that Attorney General William Barr didn’t have a heart attack upon learning the news. With Mr. Barr already fully engaged cleaning up the mighty mess in the Department of Justice, the FBI, and elsewhere — considerably aggravated by Robert Mueller’s bungled operations — another stink bomb leaves federal law enforcement beskunked, bothered, and bewildered. And now the FBI is being sent into investigate? That’s rich. America’s Deep State looks like a re-make of that marvelous 2018 movie The Death of Stalin, a fabulous burlesque of people in high places acting like dishonorable idiots.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has some ‘splainin’ to do, and they didn’t bother doing much of that on Sunday after the news came out. They failed entirely at every critical point of responsibility for keeping the DOJ’s number one criminal suspect alive: took him off suicide watch a week after he tried to off himself (if that‘s what it was); failed to keep him on observation; failed to provide a cell-mate who might have alerted the guards; and failed to deploy viable video cameras to record the doings in his cell.

That’s a pretty sensational fail. You really can’t blame the public for feeling a little paranoid about the rot at the center of government. The death of Mr. Epstein may be a turning point in the public’s willingness to accept any more official bullshit. A great many Americans — those who don’t rely on Rachel Maddow and The New York Times to do their reality testing for them — already must be impatient with the (so far) utter lack of accountability among officials implicated in that other Keystone Kops episode, the RussiaGate fiasco.

Like the sordid case of Jeffrey Epstein, RussiaGate was an affair with the tentacles of Hillary Clinton entangled through it. It was an astounding feat of legerdemain that Mr. Mueller managed to spend two years investigating the matter, and then put out 400-plus pages of a report, without ever noticing that Mrs. Clinton’s chief campaign oppo ops contractor, Glenn Simpson, was the originator of the whole thing. It may have been a too-fine point for the moiling multitudes in Flyover-land, but surely some of the spellbound Muellerites among the coastal thinking class were taken aback when the Great Man fumbled it so abysmally in his recent performance before the House Intelligence Committee.

Jeffrey Epstein is the first character in this multi-thread melodrama to turn up dead suspiciously - if you don’t count the unresolved murder of DNC employee Seth Rich, the possible conduit of those now-legendary DNC emails to Wikileaks. Rich was found on a Washington DC sidewalk with two bullets in his back and his wallet and cell phone both still on his person at the murder scene. The allegations connecting Seth Rich to the leak are supposedly “debunked,” only with no evidence, really, one way or the other, just the say-so of interested parties. It is often averred that Julian Assange could answer that riddle definitively, but Mr. Assange has not played that card (and Mr. Mueller never interviewed him).

In any case, Mr. Epstein’s supposed suicide has rocked the establishment again. The shock was palpable across the news-scape yesterday in the dearth of information the media managed to scare up in the first twenty-four hours about the most obvious questions. As I write, there’s still no “definitive” cause-of-death from the New York City medical examiner. What might they be looking for? Signs of a struggle, suggesting that Mr. E’s suicide was assisted, shall we say? Chemical analysis of his blood? Who knows what’s holding back the info? And even if foul play can’t be demonstrated, the fishy incident spreads ever more odium across US officialdom.

Meanwhile, any number of disgraced federal officials, whose misdeeds are richly documented in the public record, remain on the loose. Andrew McCabe, Bruce, Ohr, Peter Strzok, James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, and many more — once the cream of the upper echelons of federal authority! The Epstein debacle puts more pressure on William Barr, John Durham, and Michael Horowitz to get on with their jobs. All these unresolved mysteries give Americans a reason to want to arm themselves against a recklessly rogue and sinister government.

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