I, for one, need a mood-lifter. So here’d Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at his other gig, writing about sports for Grantland:
Oh, Won’t Someone Think of the Billionaires?
To paraphrase Mr. Hemingway’s famous reply to Mr. Fitzgerald — yes, the rich are different from you and me: They have more money than us, and a great many of them are a special kind of moron. Those of us who follow the sports-entertainment-industrial complex for a living take this as a given. Sooner or later, one of the various gazillionaires on our beat — whether that’s a gazillionaire who plays the game, a gazillionaire who broadcasts the games, or a gazillionaire who owns a franchise within the complex — will do something so existentially boot-headed that it makes us wonder how this person didn’t trade his last dollar for a bag of magic beans….… Over here, under the big top, we have Phil Mickelson, golfing legend, part-time economic analyst and political pundit, and, if we’re to judge recent events in the light most favorable to him, perhaps the biggest sucker in two tasseled shoes. On Friday, it was reported that the FBI buttonholed Mickelson after his round at the Memorial to talk with him about his possible knowledge of — and involvement in — an insider-trading scheme. Mickelson is maintaining his innocence and says he intends to cooperate fully with the federal authorities, there being no such thing as an “informal” chat with the FBI….
Phil Mickelson is a proud 1-percenter. So are the people who pay him to wear their logos. These include KPMG, which was hip-deep in the shenanigans that nearly blew up the world, and Barclay’s, a British bank that was out there rigging the game even after 2008. (Billy Walters isn’t the only guy in this story who knows his way around a sandbag.) So are most of the people with whom he schmoozes during the pro-ams and the sponsor events. When the world economy was left nearly in ruins, Phil Mickelson was one of the people capable of building a throne out of the rubble.
And he’s not shy about telling you, either. In January 2013, Mickelson opined that, in his considered opinion, the country was being sold into socialist bondage because his personal income tax rate had begun to inconvenience him. This got him wild applause in certain circles. Later that year, he went on TV and said that some of the CEOs with whom he regularly knocks it around were reluctant to hire people, not because they prefer to sit on large mountains of cash, but because of the Affordable Care Act. To be completely fair to Mickelson, I’m sure he golfs with CEOs and I’m sure some of them told him that very thing…
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Apart from yelling Jump, you fuckers! at the clouds, what’s on the agenda for the evening?