‘You said to watch that documentary – with all that ranting about ‘real nut jobs’ and ‘stone cold losers’ those two guys remind me of a pair of teenage boys.’

Judge Bryne grunted. ‘You mean Roger Stone and Donald Trump?’

The waitress served three breakfast plates. Conor glanced around the table. ‘That show addled my brain – since then every politician I see on TV sounds like a teenager: Paul Ryan, Sean Spicer – not Mitch McConnell. Nobody’d confuse Mitch McConnell with a teenager.’  

‘Did you read the article too?’

‘The one about bullies?’

A psychologist had written about the traits of school yard bullies: Name-calling (‘he’s a wacko’), belittling others (‘little Marco’), blaming others (‘totally wrong NBC’) and bragging (we had a H-U-G-E crowd last night).

‘What I can’t figure out,’ the judge said, ‘is what we did to deserve this plague.’

‘That’s easy: You take a fellow who’s down on his luck, in a ditch, then you hold an election and the teenage boy tells him, ‘I’m going to screw the politicians that landed you in that ditch.’

‘That’s how. Not why.’

‘Well, the why is Biblical. To cure an Egyptian of mendacity takes a plague of frogs or locusts. But when you mean to cure a hard-headed American that takes a plague of teenage boys.’