MATT TAIBBI: A Sham Case, and Everyone Knows It: Even Donald Trump’s detractors know they shouldn’t be celebrating this conviction, and some are admitting it. “Not one of these people recognized the obvious: that of all the things Donald Trump has been accused of, none are as serious or system-imperiling as abusing the courts to dispose of a political rival. If Trump was caught buggering a corpse while smoking joints rolled in rubles, it wouldn’t approach the offense of ‘concocting’ a charge to put away someone you want to ‘nail’ for ‘something.'”

Our ruling class lacks seriousness, self-awareness, and competence.

Related: Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime.

And, as a reminder that I was writing about this stuff back in the 1990s: Crime Follies: Overcriminalization, Independent Prosecutors, and the Rule of Law. “In the old days, we would refrain from ringing up the cops until after there was fairly clear evidence of a crime, such as Professor Plum lying in a pool of blood in the conservatory. Off everyone would go looking for clues, with the concrete fact of Professor Plum’s corpse to focus their energies. Today, though, we frequently summon our sophisticated investigative technicians before there is evidence of a crime. We run to the phone as soon as someone suggests Colonel Mustard might have committed some impropriety. We then try to solve the mystery of whether this or some other past indiscretion of Colonel Mustard just might constitute a crime. Nowadays, it is more remarkable when the ethics crime laboratory cannot come up with a viable theory of criminality than when it can.”