Opinion

When the FBI raided former president Donald Trump’s home, two prominent conservatives came out with a statement that the FBI was in trouble for their high-handed raid unless they were after something really serious like nuclear secrets or codes. Then on September 7th the FBI leaked the statement that they had found foreign nuclear secrets pages among the classified papers they’d seized. It was illegal, of course, for someone connected with the FBI to leak that kind of information (or any information at all for that matter). Since that time the leaker has not been arrested and the information leaked has never been proven true. All that can be said is that the leak was very conveniently timed.

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I can recall hearing more than a few times in my life the old maxim, “No good deed ever goes unpunished.” For most of my adult life I was never really sure what it meant. At face value it’s a negative statement meant to convey a truth more emphatically, which, as I would come to learn later, is a literary device called a litotes (lie-TOE-deez). They’re very common in English (for example: “She’s not an unattractive woman.”) Yet this knowledge served only to classify the phrase—when I tried to render it in the positive (“Every good deed is punished…”), it made even less sense to me. Who would punish a good deed?