Wednesday, December 23, 2015

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

...
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.

13 comments:

wibble said...

Gee, it's almost like they need a Republican National Committee to make sure they have viable Preznitial Cannidatez...

...o!O...

Ebon Krieg said...

Nice...

trgahan said...

Ol' T. Boone was probably the original "Bush who? I'm an Independent!" going way back to ca. 2006-2008 when being a conservative billionaire who voted for Bush twice got you laughed at instead of lauded. Like Welch et al, he's got paper thin skin and doesn't like it when people he sees as inferior can call his actions stupid and openly laugh at him for his beliefs.

T. Boone, along with all the donor class, will still write those campaign/Super PAC checks in 2016. Because they don't disagree with Trump and Trump will give them the exact same policy that every other GOP candidate is promising. The fake freak out going on right now is so donor class can launder its image in the face of their candidate being a Reality Show dumb fuck spouting a fascist agenda.

bowtiejack said...

Some years ago, another great political scientist and billionaire, H.L. Hunt, wrote a novel called Alpaca. In it, he put forth his cutting-edge ideas for a better America, which in particular revolved around allocating votes based on net worth - the richer you were (quelle coincidence!) the more votes you got.
After failing to interest any of the New York commie-liberal publishers, H.L. finally self-published it with the same printing company that did the yellow pages phonebooks for Dallas. Sales were, uh, modest.

A few years later, a Texas Congressman running for re-election and short on funds, met with H.L. hoping for a campaign contribution. After explaining his rather desperate need and being praised by H.L. for several political positions he had taken, the Congressman was elated to hear H.L. say he wanted to give him something to help out.

He reached into a bottom drawer of his desk, pulled out a metal cash box, unlocked it and took out a copy of Alpaca, which he handed to the Congressman, saying "There's a lot of good information in there you can use."

These jackasses are absolutely without any introspection and probably think irony is something to do with housework ("The wife's gotta do all the irony stuff today.")

Brad in Dallas said...

Yeah, Iran has one of those, run by imams.

Paul W said...

Can I upvote wibble?

Paul W said...

I wanna upvote bowtiejack and donald walsh too.

bowtiejack said...

Paul Wartenberg
Thanks for the nice words.
For what's it's worth, the Congressman in question was Joe Pool who told the story to my father, Walter Rogers, who was then a Member of Congress from Texas with Joe. Of course, many politicians are great storytellers, and apparently Joe could really describe his hopes and anticipation as HL Hunt opened that cash box. Really, Republicans/Conservatives are such dicks.

driftglass said...

I deleted a comment in error.
My mistake/pls repost and I'll get it right this time :-)

Ivory Bill Woodpecker said...

This Frum quote from Drifty's last post fits both Hunt and Pickens:

"One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong."

Mike Lumish said...

"When poll numbers put Mr. Obama ahead, they are skewed."

Sadly enough, we are seeing plenty of this over in Bernie World. If the polls show Hellary leading by a two to one margin then the pollsters must be undercounting the army of Democratic Socialists who, despite never having voted while fully intending to get out and vote The Bern, seem embarrassed to admit in public that they intend to vote The Bern and make their true wishes plain only in private conversations with Bernie Enthusiasts.

Robt said...

Billionaires gone wild
The next generation of inheritance overlords
Where no universe master has defied democracy before..

Paris Hilton has already been in focus. Wait for her brother to wield his scepter. The son of Russert, anyone? The Wal Mart heirs, The Rupert Murdoch Frankenstein. The offspring of the Kochs, Adelson, Langones. The all knowing oracles that did not build that but hired as CEO of a profitable corporation that merely had to ride it to wealth. How brilliant is Mr. Langone for inventing a Hardware store that no other could have invented. He should be in the history books with Edison.

I recall as a child, I put together a train set and turned on the power. Only to watch the train continue its oval course over and over again without doing a thing. Oh sure, as I became board. I put up little town replicas to enhance my view and made claim in amusement to what I alone built. Sure the train came with instructions and many train sets were sold. But I was able to make sure, mine was the only one in in all my little towns.
Eliminating the competition (no matter how" id just pure genius only those of the wealth calibre as a TrUmp or a Romney can bestow the goodness of Glinda's aura unto us.

When the next generation of inheritance masters have the inheritance wills read to them by the family lawyers. "To my eldest son, I leave exclusively all my authority over those I have owned. To my youngest, I leave him the state of Kansas and its people to do with as he sees fit.

It is not unrealistic sarcasm. Look at so many Governors? Gee, he got rich . I bet if we made him Governor he will make me rich too. As Ayn Rand becomes the states constitution.



starskeptic said...

Angry Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair ™
(updated)