Here is one of those episodes I file away in a folder labeled “Cocaine Thinking.”
But first, an editorial note: Sometimes, it is the deadpan quote that really lands.
E.g.:
“It was clearly a human in a bear suit.”
The headline, tame as it is, efficiently does sell the story:
3 Southern California residents sentenced in bear suit insurance fraud scheme.
You want to know, right? You’re going to click on that link. Like a good cocaine dealer, I’ll give you a little taste for free:
Three Southern California residents have been sentenced in a bizarre insurance fraud scheme which prosecutors say involved them staging fake bear attacks on high-end cars.
It all stems from a claim the suspects filed with their insurance company, saying a bear got into their car, a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost, at Lake Arrowhead on Jan. 28, 2024, and damaged the inside with scratches. The California Department of Insurance said the suspects provided a video to the company, which showed the “bear” in the car.
An investigation into the claim—dubbed “Operation Bear Claw”—took a closer look at the video and found the “bear” was actually a person in a bear costume, the insurance department said. Investigators then took the video to biologists with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to also look at the video. The biologists said, “It was clearly a human in a bear suit.”
You can go into court and plead guilty or not guilty on that, and maybe you hope that the court will make like Arlen Specter and let you off with the “bastard verdict”—not proven—but the truth of the matter is that the proper plea is one not found in the law books:
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Like Kash Patel after eight, having been to that lowdown place “where happy hour ain’t happy,” as Terry Allen put it, all of us are to some extent vulnerable to delusional, wishful thinking. Jack and coke don’t help. Donald Trump is famously a teetotaler, and it is difficult to imagine him as a cocaine enthusiast, because it is difficult to imagine him having fun. (The great danger of cocaine has always been truth in advertising: It works exactly as advertised.) Giving Trump a gram of powdered hubris would very much be a coals-to-Newcastle affair—the man is living proof that you do not need a bag of cocaine to engage in cocaine thinking. Trump doesn’t have to look very far to see parallel cases: Bobby Kennedy Jr. apparently has been off the smack for a long time now, but he still thinks and acts like a junkie; Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel do not seem to be better at making good decisions when sober than they do when drunk. Hegseth in particular seems to have an early-onset case of that sad condition described by David Foster Wallace, where one is so mentally diminished by booze that it ceases to matter, in any particular moment, whether one is actually intoxicated. The Trump administration is the hangover without the bender, the delirium tremens without the fun part, the suicidally depressive post-cocaine crash without the high, the long parole for the fraud conviction without the mad Rolls Royce frolic in the bear costume.
(“It was clearly a human in a bear suit.”)
