Losing the Fortune

Today on The Today Show, Ted Turner, always good for a laugh, complained about "losing the fortune," and how becoming a pauper has interfered with his charitable giving. He decried his own stupidity in not cashing in his AOL/Time Warner stock "once I had lost control of the direction of the company," as if, had it stayed under his control, the stock would never have tanked. Since the merger itself was his idea, exactly what he would have done differently is left to our imagination. It's as if this towering ego believes that all of us see him as a towering intellect, and understand that the ruminations of his mind are beyond our mortal power to divine.

He complained bitterly how he had become so poor that his "fortune is down in the hundreds of millions." Poor baby. As if that was not enough, he saw grave effects upon the human condition that his pauperization would bring, citing his plan to "Build a world where nobody's angry enough to be a terrorist." Exactly what his plan is to accomplish this feat, and exactly how the plan will now fail since he can not finance it with his own money, he leaves tantalizingly unspoken. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Maybe the citizens of the world should contribute a few billion to him so that he can get on with the important work of making sure that the anger of the terrorists is assuaged, since he is the only one qualified to do it.

Maybe it's the money that makes Ted so nutty. In other news this morning, a woman whose six dental practices netted her and her (now dead) husband "$60,000 per month" described how, when she was running her husband down "two or three times" she was in a mental state where "everything was in slow motion." How or why her judgement was impaired by going so slowly that this constitutes an excuse for murder escapes me, probably because I don't have enough money to understand the mental machinations of the rich and murderously jealous.

And for those on the left who decry President Bush's mispronounciation of the word nuclear as "nuke-u-lar," this morning I heard Robert Kennedy Jr., man of the left and decrier of wind power (but only when it spoils the view from his family mansion), was decrying "nuke-u-lar" power as well this morning. So it is not just idiots of the right who mispronounce the word, but idiots of the left can do the same. But I have one nit to pick with RFK's son: if we can't have nuclear power, and we can't have wind power, and petroleum causes global warming, how are we to keep the chill of winter out of our homes? Not to mention how we are to get to the polls to vote for members of his family next election day. I suppose we will just have to walk, or ride a bicycle.

Thank God I don't have enough money to be as foolish of any of these bozos.