The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

About a week ago, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte came under fire for "joking" with troops, saying, under martial law, "You can arrest any person, search any house. I alone would be responsible for anything you do under martial law. I will go to jail for you. If you happen to have raped three women, I will own up to it." To this, Chelsea Clinton responded via Twitter with the tweet, "Not funny. Ever." Duterte of course couldn't let this go and told Clinton, "When your father was screwing Lewinsky and the rest of the young girls there in the office of the president, on the table, on the sofa, did you raise any criticism?" While I in no way condone former President Bill Clinton's actions in cheating on then First Lady Hillary Clinton, the sexual relations were consensual. Rape is a completely different beast, where one person is forced beyond their will to engage in intercourse. Duterte is making an apples-and-oranges argume...

Billionaire Thomas Perkins recently wrote a letter-to-the-editor in the Wall Street Journal which made me realize it is possible be both a billionaire and stupid. In this letter-to-the-editor, the venture capitalist wrote the following: "I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazy Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.' ... From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these 'techno geeks' can pay. ... This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in ...

Just recently, a Canadian entrepreneur proved it is very possible to simultaneously be a millionaire and an idiot. On The Lang & O'Leary Exchange , Canadian millionaire Kevin O'Leary said the following with regard to a recent report about the rise in income inequality: "It's fantastic! This is a great thing because it inspires everybody, gets them motivation to look up to the one percent and say, 'I want to become one of those people, I'm going to fight hard to get up to the top. this is fantastic news and of course I'm going to applaud it! What can be wrong with this?" Co-host Amanda Lang then stared at him with the classic I-can't-believe-what-you-just-said look, and said, "Really?" O'Leary responded with, "Yes, really. I celebrate capitalism." Lang then countered with this: "So somebody living on $1 a day in Africa is getting up in the morning and saying, 'I'm going to be Bill Gates'?" ...

To my surprise yesterday morning, I received an email with the subject title of, "Douche????" from a name I didn't recognize at first - Thomas Ritter. After I read his email, which I'll get to in a minute, I had to backtrack on recent writings of mine, before finally searching my blog for "douche." Low-and-behold, I stumbled across the name Thomas J. Ritter - a fifth-grade schoolteacher in the state of Texas. On December 4th, I read an article about Mr. Ritter which prompted me to write a blog about it. You see, Mr. Ritter sent President Obama a critical letter with regard to the Affordable Care Act, where he said this: "This bill has caused such a divisive, dirisive [sic], and toxic environment ... The reality is that any citizen that disagrees with your administration is targeted and ridiculed. I hesitated to write for fear of some kind of retribution. I watched you make fun of tea baggers and your press secretary make fun of Ms. Palin which wa...