The process plays itself out lethargically and ruinously

Whether dealing with "scumbag billionaires," "hockey-stick huckster," or "climate mullah," Mark Steyn does not back away from fights. As he says here, the process is the punishment.

Thus American justice in the 21st century: It can ruin a no-name Trump campaign volunteer in nothing flat. But it can't try a guy who murdered three thousand innocents in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, another two hundred in the Bali nightclub bombing, plus Daniel Pearl in Pakistan ...and has confessed to all this and more.

It's all a joke: civilian, military; federal, state; criminal, civil; family, probate. As my old boss Conrad Black likes to point out, the United States has as many lawyers as the rest of the world combined. One entirely inevitable consequence of that malign distortion in the labor market is that far more aspects of life are litigated, and, when they are, the natural tendency of the system is for everything to take far longer than it would anywhere else. So what counts is not plaintiff or defendant, but which party is in the position to inflict the most pain on the other - whether that's a lavishly endowed government or a billionaire scumbag reduced to suing his own company to avoid paying a court judgment. Whatever it takes for as long as it takes.