I have sometimes pondered the pivotal moment when money changes people forever. The answer is, without doubt, the acquisition of the private plane—it’s the moment when you leave the human race forever. And having just flown back on JetBlue Mosaic from the Dominican Republic, sitting next to an enormous Russian chomping plantain chips, I attest wholeheartedly that it’s a loss of connection not to be regretted.
So it is no surprise to me that Bill Clinton, in his new memoir Citizen: My Life After the White House, ascribes his dependence on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane to the travel needs of the Clinton Foundation. Who else is going to put his Boeing 727 at the service of an ex-president to fly around to what our soon-to-be 47th president once called “shithole countries” than a pedophile like Epstein in desperate need of adding sheen to his slime? In 2002, Epstein picked up Clinton in Siberia on the “Lolita Express” and flew him to a U.S. naval base in Japan, which hardly sounds like the thrumming locus of nubile orgies.