3For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4They have no struggles;
their bodies are healthy and strong. a
5They are free from common human burdens;
they are not plagued by human ills.
6Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
7From their callous hearts comes iniquity b ;
their evil imaginations have no limits.
8They scoff, and speak with malice;
with arrogance they threaten oppression.
10Therefore their people turn to them
and drink up waters in abundance. c
11They say, “How would God know?
Does the Most High know anything?” (Psalm 73)
Roger Stone was the kind of undercover political operative that Donald Trump might have been referring to when he promised to “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington. The only problem was Stone was a long-time political crony of Donald Trump. Rather than draining the swamp of Stone, Trump employed him to derail the Russia investigation. Among the offenses Roger Stone was convicted of was witness tampering.
Stone orchestrated hundreds of fake Facebook accounts and bloggers to run a political influence scheme on social media.[34][35][36] On January 25, 2019, Stone was arrested at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home in connection with Robert Mueller‘s Special Counsel investigation and charged in an indictment with witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and five counts of making false statements.[37][38] Stone was convicted on all seven felony counts in November 2019[11][39][40] and was sentenced to 40 months in prison.[41]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stone
Like all good political operatives, Stone kept his boss out of his narrative and thus set the table for the President to commute his sentence. At this point the story of Roger Stone has become so convoluted that I have set a table in a swamp, but sometimes a mixed metaphor can best tell the story of a character like Stone.
Roger Stone’s history as a dirty trickster goes back fifty years, as I reported in my blog of January 26, 2019: Stone’s Watergate high jinks were revealed during congressional hearings in 1973, and the news cost Stone his job on the staff of Senator Robert Dole. https://wtucker.edublogs.org/2019/01/26/ruminating-a-by-gone-era/.
Despite his reputation or probably because of it, Stone remained a role-player in political campaigns from Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole,[6] to Donald Trump. He prided himself on his ruthlessness and barely concealed his dirty tricks, including his association with Wikileaks broker Julian Assange. His arrogance appeared to extend to the expectation of his already-reduced sentence being commuted by the President. Yesterday his expectations were fulfilled.
So Roger Stone dodges still another bullet and lives again to prowl the political swamp. His release causes us to re-think the justice system that cannot contain a lifelong felon, a political reptile. We have to wonder with the Psalmist:
“How would God know?/ Does the Most High know anything?”
The Psalmist reconciled himself by looking at the long haul, the eventual retribution of God’s judgment.
8Surely you place them on slippery ground;
you cast them down to ruin.
19How suddenly are they destroyed,
completely swept away by terrors!
We are still waiting for the fatal slip of Roger Stone.
