August 22, 2014

Mitchell Berger, Esq.
Berger Singerman
350 E Las Olas Blvd
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

Mr. Berger,

I received your letter and a copy of “Risky Business” – not the Tom Cruise opus of the same name – this morning. I am most appreciative. I like it when the fish compete to see who can first jump into the barrel wearing a sign saying in flashing letters “Shoot me first, please.”

May I comment on 2 Risky Business Risk Committee members?

Robert Rubin formally withdrew as a partner of Goldman Sachs and liquidated his holdings on December 27, 1992. He became Assistant Secretary of the Treasury when Bill Clinton was sworn in as President. Lloyd Bentsen was the Secretary of the Treasury. I mention Bentsen because he was the Vice Presidential candidate in 1988. Wee Mikey Dukakis was the Presidential candidate. [Although he is remembered for many notable things – He was the Governor who furloughed a murdering rapist named Willie Horton who, can you believe it, raped and murdered again. What’s Willie boy doing these days? Some people never let you down. Who can forget the picture of Mikey driving a tank? I can’t. It stood unchallenged until Jay Forbes Kerry decided to dress up as a friggin’ rabbit, the better to capture the trans-gendered, lactose-intolerant Peter Cottontail/Easter Bunny vote in 2004. Honest. Look it up.] You may recall that Bentsen spent a lot of campaign time explaining why he was able to charge lobbyists $10,000…for breakfast. For 10 large I want to see that chicken lay ginormous Guinness Book eggs]

In March/April, 1993 Rubin recommended a personal income tax increase retroactive to January 1, 1993. Any pre-New Year’s Eve transactions slipped under the IRS radar. The hint of smarminess abounded.

Coincidence?

I hope not. I was born and raised as an Irish-Catholic in Bayonne, NJ. That’s at the good end of Hudson County. My father, the legendary Judge Smith, used to tell me that “Men Working” signs in the street were Republican propaganda. One of life’s important lessons, learned coincidental with the weaning process, was the ability to tell the buttered side from the dry.

Coincidence?

As Jeeves said to Bertie, “They happen as often as you find a trout in the milk”.

Anyway, by 2002 he and the Rasputin look-a-like, Paul Krugman, both were shilling for Enron. You have to hand it to those 1%ers. “Whose wine I drink whose song I sing” is a sweet tune indeed for those who hunt where the ducks are.

My favorite Donna Shalala moment – other than the tape of her audition as the parrot sitting on Janet Reno’s shoulder in the failed musical, Long John Silver, The First Disabled Pirate is of her in the Oval Office with President Handsome Billy from Hot Springs. It was August, 1997. He had just given a press conference in the Rose Garden. August in DC is either unbearably hot or unbelievingly unbearably hot. The President of the United States, a man with one hand on the nuclear trigger and the other one up Monica’s blue dress, told the nation it was hot because of Global Warming. He then said that Global Warming was caused by, you guessed it, hot days in August.

He was stretching the edges of the envelope labeled “Philandering Presidential Perjurers” to include “Tautologies As A Way Of Life – It Sure Beats The Hell Out Of the Scientific Method”.

Meanwhile, back in the Oval Office, Ms Shalala was advising the President about “Midnight Basketball” or some such mush-brained, nit-witted modern American Liberal gravity defying public policy proposal, when she said “What difference does it make? We’ll all be dead from AIDS in 10 years.”

I am still thankful for the 10 extra years she gave me in 1997.

You may recall “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich, Ph.D., [of course, Ph.D, of course] in 1969.

He said we would all be dead by 2000. The only mystery was whether we would starve to death before we froze. I think that the absence of protein makes us more susceptible to hypothermia but what do I know?

Wait a minute!

Did I say “freeze”? You betcha.

In 1969 the “science was settled”. Global Cooling was the culprit.

Speaking of “settled science”, Ptolemy was the top dog in astronomy for 15 centuries. That’s 1,500 years. Whatever happened to him? Let me know if you hear anything about him. Him, Judge Crater, and the Malaysian air plane. Whodathunk.

How soon can we expect the announcement about your firm no longer handling real estate transactions that have anything g to do with water? Will you be turning off your A/Cs soon? When will you mandate public transportation only for your employees – non partners? You say “we owe it to future generations”.

How many more polar bears must drown before you show us the way?

I may need counsel. Although the statute has probably run you can’t be too sure when you’re dealing with tree hugging Cossacks. In the 1970s I used to finish my AM ablutions by firing a healthy dollop of Right Guard out the bathroom window. It was the least I could do to hasten the demise of the Ozone Layer. Before he became Vice President Senator Alpha Gump, the noted Tennessee slum lord who was raised in the Shoreham Hotel where he was served pulp free orange juice and toast with the crusts removed and cut diagonally by Uncle Ben looking Black men who wore white gloves, would hector the country about the dangers of a world free of Ozone.

I felt proud that I had done my part.

Anyway, having already been the victim of police visits because of something I had written to or about modern American Liberal politicians – Think Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Miriam Oliphant, to name 2 – who knows what these fans of furbish louseworts will do. [By the way, can you tell me why the EPA needs automatic weapons and trigger happy SWAT teams?]

Detective Joe Kessling of the Criminal Investigations Division of the Broward Sheriff’s Office told me I had “nothing to worry about”. I said, “You have a badge and a fucking gun. What do you mean I have nothing to worry about?” Satire in Broward County, in modern American Liberal Broward County, is an alien concept.

If you think my response is one toe over the line of argumentum ad hominen you are right. Since the arguments of the lunatic Luddites who want to do away with electricity and the snake oil grifters who speak for them always begin with some combination of argumenta ad absurdum and/or ad captandum I can’t afford the luxury of civil discourse.

Your assignment is to get your hands on and your mind around one of the oldest fallacies in the world. After 25 centuries it prospers because it is easier than thinking. The trait most necessary in a modern American Liberal is to confuse feeling with ideas. The Trivium takes no prisoners.


POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC

Lysenko would be proud.



Kevin Smith