Yet Another Crackpot American Billionaire Does Not Understand How America Works

(h/t Alert Reader LS)

For a long time now, The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair ™ hasn't just a place for your drunk, Bircher uncle and his gun-humping pals to let their freak flags fly.  Oh my no.  In fact as recently as three years ago, The Tribe included many of America's richest and most well-respected lunatics as charter members.  For example, who can forget back in 2012 when billionaire crank Jack Welch and a whole phalanx of his fellow Conservative donor basket-cases all fell out with near-fatal cases of the flaming fantods because real world arithmetic math was in irreconcilable conflict with the voices in their heads? 

Conspiracy World

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To live and seethe in that world of conspiracy theories means rejecting any form of objective reality. When unemployment numbers make the administration look good, they are obviously “cooked.” When poll numbers put Mr. Obama ahead, they are skewed. Birth certificates are forgeries. Safety-net programs are giveaways to supporters. Health insurance reform is socialism. And campaign donation disclosure is antibusiness.

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Last week, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, depriving Mitt Romney of his standard talking point that the rate had never been below 8 percent during Mr. Obama’s term. No one expected Republicans to celebrate a positive trend for the country, but almost immediately the anchors on Fox News and the editors of right-wing Web sites saw something more sinister: a conspiracy, led by the Obama campaign, to manipulate the numbers to make the president look good a month before the election.

The charge was absurd. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which along with the Census Bureau conducts the underlying household survey, is run by career civil servants and is impervious to political pressure and manipulation, as all but the hypnotized in Washington understand. But, this time, the conspiracy theorists went beyond the usual suspects. Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, said Mr. Obama’s Chicago staff obviously changed the numbers, though he had no evidence of chicanery beyond the outrageous charge that the numbers came from an “ideologue division of the federal government.”

To Mr. Welch and his fellow cynics, the facts were inconvenient, so they had to be wrong. And not just wrong, but deliberately so. That’s the same mentality that led ideologues last month to accuse independent pollsters of deliberately skewing polls to show Mr. Obama ahead, though no such charges are emerging now that Mr. Romney is improving in the polls. And this trend is reinforced when people who know better, like Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain, trash the civil servants at the State Department and the Congressional Budget Office. (Mr. Romney, to his credit, did not question the latest jobless figures.)

Democrats aren’t happy about the latest polls, but they aren’t suggesting Mr. Romney is manipulating them, just as they didn’t undermine the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the jobless numbers were high. Many are far more worried about a conspiracy that is verifiable and serious: the concerted effort by Republicans over the last four years to deprive minorities, poor people and other likely Democratic supporters of their voting rights.

That, of course, doesn’t seem to bother those who see “Chicago’s” evil hand everywhere. When there is real-world evidence of political collusion, the conspiracy theorists are nowhere to be found.

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Good times!

But now things have changed, and the "drunk, Bircher uncle and his gun-humping pals" members of The Tribe have decided they're done with arranged marriages to Wall Street Conservative cyborgs. Instead, they've starting slutting around with a fast-talking, Big City real estate mogul of who Daddy Donor definitely does not approve,  but who knows how to make their batshit ganglia twitch. Which is why billionaire-American and life-long underwriter of crackpot wingnut schemes, T. Boone Pickens, feels that Daddy Donor needs to step in to put a stop to all of this wild, shameless, footloosery and instead install some kinda "bipartisan panel" which would screen out the unmanageable, large-bore loons so that the best possible smaller-bore, Pickens-acceptable loons end up running for president:

T. Boone Pickens calls for bipartisan panel to screen candidates for president

BP Capital founder T. Boone Pickens, a billionaire Republican donor, is calling for a bipartisan panel to determine who can run for president.

According to the Library of Congress, the only stipulations for running for president include being a natural born citizen, a resident of 14 years and at least 35 years old. Such limited standards allow political outsiders like Republican front-runner Donald Trump to run for president — and Pickens thinks they're not stringent enough.

“My big idea for 2016 is to put together a bipartisan screening committee that vets presidential candidates like we do anyone else applying for a job and recommends the best candidates possible,” Pickens wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. “We have people running for president now who don’t even have experience running a lemonade stand.”

Pickens, who donated to Jeb Bush early on before flirting with Ben Carson, said the committee should factor in leadership experience, team-building skills and plans for prospective candidates’ administration.

“Right now we have a process that emphasizes accusation and innuendo,” Pickens said, alluding to the incessant brawls among Republican primary contenders. “Fact-checking is done … after the fact. And just like reality TV, there is too much of an emphasis on the inconsequential and the irrelevant. Such a vetting process could alleviate much of that.”...

The fact that I have no doubt that ol' T. Boone sincerely believes this and that no one around him had the huevos to tell him that he sounds like a dribbling halfwit is what makes it awesome.