Once upon a time, there was a rock-ribbed conservative U.S. senator who tried mightily to get an über-conservative law passed but was met with great resistance by his liberal colleagues.  This went on not for months, but for almost two years.

But he was so persistent and determined that those same resistant colleagues — and their lapdogs in the left-wing media — started to call him “bulldog” — even, at times, Senator Bulldog!

Then, one beautiful spring day, he was both astounded and delighted to learn that he had enough votes to pass his proposed law.  The vote was to be taken shortly after the Senate came back from lunch.

As the senator walked along Constitution Avenue to his favorite lunch spot, The Capitol Hill Club, enjoying the gorgeous sight of the wisteria and magnolias and cherry blossoms in bloom, he felt ebullient and redeemed and also proud that his persistence, and the righteousness of his cause, would finally see the light.

There he was, Central Casting, walking tall in his blue suit, white shirt (with cuff links!), red tie… the perfect symbolic colors, he thought, for this milestone day in his life.

Hello, Senator!

As he strode along, another Central Casting figure came up to his side — tall, handsome, also dressed to the nines.

“Hello, Senator.  How are you today?”

The senator, long in public service, was accustomed to people he had never met greeting him, saying hello, wishing him well, or advising him on political matters.  And, of course, insulting him.

“Very well.  It’s a beautiful day.”

“Well, Senator,” said the stranger, “I know when you get back to the Senate, you’re going to vote ‘no’ on that proposed legislation.”

At this presumptuous, ridiculous, insulting, and bizarre remark — at the very idea that he would vote “no” on the legislation he had worked on assiduously for almost two years — he turned to the strange man and asked, with irritation in his voice, “Do I know you?”

“Well, no, Senator,” the stranger replied.  “We’ve never met.  But I do know that your daughter just got an off-campus apartment in Virginia.  Have a nice day, Senator!”

With that, the stranger jumped into a dark sedan that at that moment had conveniently pulled up to the curb, and he was gone.

Fact or Fiction?

I shared the above imaginary scenario with a few “inside D.C.” Democrat and Republican people I know — two acclaimed journalists, a hugely prominent Democrat politician, a longtime aide to an influential member of the U.S. Congress, and a high-ranking military official — and asked them if they thought my introduction rang true, was plausible, or was not at all credible.

To a person, they said it was all too plausible.  “Don’t change a word,” one person wrote.

That was no surprise to me, because it is now clear even to skeptics and cynics that what the American public has known, or strongly suspected, for decades is that the D.C. swamp — meaning the government that We the People elected — is a virtual cesspool of corruption, malfeasance, grift, payoffs, bribes, and the very definition of criminality.

But is it also the very definition — as the above scenario suggests — of murder for hire?

The V.P.?

Even after 62 years, the question of who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963 remains undecided, with theories ranging from a cover-up decision by the Warren Commission, which blamed the 46-year-old president’s death on the “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald, to author Rob Morrow’s contention and conclusion that the entire tragedy was conceived, choreographed, and carried out by JFK’s V.P., Lyndon Baines Johnson.  The latter recommends these two resources as proof: LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination by Phillip Nelson and this scholarly article by Jeremy Kuzmarov for Covert Action Magazine, which indicts LBJ for JFK’s death.

No Exit Wound?

Vince Foster served as White House counsel during the first six months of the Clinton administration.  According to The Washington Post, although Foster had risen to “the pinnacle of the Arkansas legal establishment,” he was unhappy at the White House and became depressed.  In July 1993, 48-year-old Foster was found dead of a gunshot wound to his mouth in Fort Marcy Park.  Although five official government investigations ruled his death a suicide, conspiracy theories persisted, including that there was no exit wound; that the way Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, handled Foster’s files and documents immediately after his death was fishy; and that the Clintons themselves were involved in his death.  Strangely, in 2004, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that pictures of the scene and autopsy should not be released.

The Infamous Laundry List

Well, what a coincidence!  The following year, 1993, the Clinton Body Count List made its debut, asserting that both Bill and Hillary Clinton  had secretly had their political opponents murdered, often making it look like suicides.  At the time, the list totaled 50 victims, but since then it has ballooned, with political consultant and lobbyist Roger Stone asserting that the Clintons were responsible for the deaths of dozens of people, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and John F. Kennedy, Jr.

A Bullet Hole?

On April 3, 1996, Ron Brown, 54, a lawyer, former Navy captain, politician, and lobbyist who was the United States secretary of commerce during President Clinton’s first term, and before that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was killed, along with 34 others, in a 1996 plane crash in Croatia.  The Air Force attributed the crash to pilot error and a poorly designed landing approach, but conspiracists suspected a cover-up because Brown was under investigation for corruption and because doctors conducting an autopsy found a circular wound on top of his head, which they discounted as a bullet hole, but others theorized to the contrary.

Murdered?

After helping The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report get off the ground, conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart founded Breitbart News, which was credited with exposing the Anthony Weiner texting scandal and the alleged vote-rigging of ACORN, among other blockbuster news events.

Previously left-leaning, Breitbart changed his political views, describing himself as “85% conservative and 15% libertarian.”  He took on liberal icons like Nancy Pelosi, and hours after Sen. Ted Kennedy died in August 2009, Breitbart called him a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard,” and “a special pile of human excrement,” adding, “Sorry, he destroyed lives.  And he knew it,” referring to Kennedy’s actions during the Chappaquiddick incident, the Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination, and the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination.

On February 29, 2012, Breitbart collapsed on a street near his home in Brentwood and died the next day at the age of 43 of heart failure, according to an autopsy.  Eerily, just a couple of weeks later, the coroner who worked on Breitbart’s body died by poisoning.

In the International Business Times, journalist Amanda Remling wrote in an article entitled “Andrew Breitbart Cause of Death: Was He Assassinated?” that “right before the blogger’s death he claimed to have videos that showed President Obama’s ties to radicals in the 1980s.  The videos are going to come out, Breitbart had said.  The narrative is going to come out that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver ponytails back in the 1980s like Bill [Ayers] and Bernadine Dorhn who, equally radical, said ‘One day we’re going to have the presidency.’”

Punished?

On July 10, 2016, at 4:18 A.M., Seth Rich, an employee of the Democratic National Convention, was shot two times in the back and rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died at the age of 27.  According to writer Mark Oliver, “rumors and theories started to spread about why a young man in the prime of his life had met his end on a dark street in Washington, D.C.  The police said it was an attempted robbery gone wrong, but hard evidence discounted that theory.  However, stories soon started to spread that Seth’s death was planned, and that he was the man who had leaked the Democratic Party’s e-mails to Wikileaks,” a website cofounded by Julian Assange, whose past and present involve both creativity and imprisonment.  According to this website, “Wikileaks has never officially said that Rich was the source of their leak, but they have done pretty much everything they can to suggest it.”

The Grace of God

And they still haven’t found out who ordered the hit — twice! — on President Trump!

Target?

A wealthy and educated European-born and raised socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell moved to New York in 1990 after her father, media mogul Robert Maxwell, bought the New York Daily News and chose her to act as his emissary.  She is famous for collaborating with the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on his island home in the Caribbean.  In court documents, Epstein’s accusers allege that Maxwell acted as a recruiter, an instructor, and in some cases a participant in the abuse he practiced.  In 2021, she was found guilty of child sex–trafficking and other offences and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.

Now the House Oversight Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice has summoned Maxwell to testify.  But mmmmm...House breaks early when the Epstein issue comes up!

If there is no Epstein client list, as Attorney General Bondi and President Trump have pronounced, Maxwell can waltz into D.C. with no bodyguards and no worries.  But if there is a list, we have to ask ourselves: What could possibly go wrong?

As I’ve said in many articles, this is the short list.  But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if all the lofty verbiage our politicians express about their intentions to better our lives is simply a glib cover-up for the criminality they routinely engage in.

Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.

Image via Pexels.