This Week in IOKIYAR: The Apex Predator of the Wingnut Welfare Food Chain

Take one, hideously tasteless PowerPoint presentation.

Tweak it slightly for the rich asshole trade show lecture circuit.

That global wealth management system has got to be here somewhere!

Nope, no global wealth management system over there.

Maybe under here...

And -- bingo! -- instant, non-controversial payday (with a h/t to Brother Pierce for digging this one out of the daily DC mudslide): 

On talk circuit, George W. Bush makes millions but few waves

Since 2009, the former president has given at least 200 paid speeches, typically pocketing $100,000 to $175,000 per appearance.

By Michael Kruse 

...

As critics over the years have chided Bill Clinton and also his wife for the industriousness with which they have pursued opportunities to get paid a lot of money in this manner, Bush, too, has been doing exactly what he said he would be doing.

Since 2009, POLITICO has found, Bush has given at least 200 paid speeches and probably many more, typically pocketing $100,000 to $175,000 per appearance. The part-time work, which rarely requires more than an hour on stage, has earned him tens of millions of dollars.

Relative to the Clintons, though, he’s attracted considerably less attention, almost always doing his paid public speaking in private, in convention centers and hotel ballrooms, resorts and casinos, from Canada to Asia, from New York to Miami, from all over Texas to Las Vegas a bunch, playing his part in what has become a lucrative staple of the modern post-presidency.

He has talked to the National Grocers Association and the National Association for Home Care and Hospice and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. He’s talked to global wealth management firms and multinational energy companies. He has talked to motivational seminars and boat builders and something called the Work Truck Show. He has talked to the chambers of commerce in San Diego and Wichita.

“Evil is real,” he said at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas.

“Bowling is fun,” he said at a get-together for the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America in Orlando.

“History will ultimately judge whether I made the right decisions or not,” he said at a gathering put on by the Advertising Specialty Institute in Dallas.

...

Long ago when I hadda full-time job, I had the opportunity to see Bill Clinton speak.  I assume he was paid more for an hour's work than I now make in any two year period.  He was also outstanding:

Some years ago -- during the depths of the Dubya Administration and through absolutely no fault of my own -- I was asked pretty-please to attend the BIO International Convention which, for the first time, was being held in Chicago.

So I went, and although I have thoroughly suppressed everything I learned about bioinformatics, I still have a lovely tote to show for it.

The highlight was a keynote by Bill Clinton held in one of the McCormick Place's cavernous, sit-down-lunch-for-12,000 halls. For over an hour, Clinton banished the smirkingly anti-intellectual pall of the Dumbass Dauphin and spoke compellingly and without notes (in complete sentences yet!) about how being smarter makes us safer. How using technology to do good -- like bringing clean water to Africa -- also redounded to our geopolitical benefit. Because if people like and respect us, they're less likely to hate and kill us.

And other suchlike subversive, crazy notions.

The lowlight was undoubtedly Neal Cavuto's speech some time later, given, as I recall, the same hall. It was as vicious, petty and vengeful a verbal sniping as you could imagine. Two of the more remarkable moments that I remember vividly were his snarling out to the pharmaceutical reps gathered there that filthy Liberals wanted to "piss in their hair", and his urging them to "withhold medication" from Liberals to teach us a lesson...

Like it or not, this is how life is for those who have achieved escape velocity from the laboring classes and have taken up permanent residence in Capitalist Asgard.

And so while we wait for "history" to ship its judgement of the Bush Era in by slow freight, the lightening-fast judgement of the marketplace is busy making George W. Bush the apex predator of the wingnut welfare food chain.