FRANKLY, MY DEAR, I DON'T GIVE A HOOT

WARNING: Depending on your tolerance for churlish remarks, you may fInd this piece distasteful. If so, I've succeeded. Proceed at your own risk. 

For much of my life, I wasted my time believing that everybody deserved a little empathy. But as I get older, it becomes more clear that some people are just asking for the back of my hand, or at least a nasty remark.

Yeah, Steve had it bad, alright.

For instance, let's examine the recent suicide of Steve Bing: businessman, philanthropist, movie producer/writer. But what he's best known for is fucking Elizabeth Hurley for a good (likely great) 18 months. Most men would want to live as long as possible to retain that memory. 

But here's the capper. Bing inherited $600,000,000 from his grandfather at age 18. That, in case there are too many zeroes to count, is over a half-billion dollars. Yet at the time of his death, Bing had only $300,000 to his name. 

Could you run through that much dough in 37 years? Well, maybe, if you weren't paying attention to your finances, I suppose, or you weren't investing wisely, or if you didn't take the time to set aside, say, $100-million for your golden years. But if you have over half a billion, your whole goddamn life should be your golden years.

Call me cold, cruel or callous. Throw in obdurate while you're at it. My point of view is simple: when you've been gifted 600-mill, you should be able to enjoy a paradisal life and still be able to give to charities, produce movies, and fuck Elizabeth Hurley until a normal check-out time arrives. Steve Bing was the kind of guy who gives money a bad name.

Oh but you don't know what was going on in his head! Sure I do. Re-read the third sentence in the above paragraph, with emphasis on "fuck Elizabeth Hurley". Then get back to me. 

Glass houses? Takes one to know one?
You decide.

Let's move on. Is it too soon to revisit Jeffrey Toobin? Frankly, I'm not sure if anyone will want to visit him for a while, pandemic or no. But there are likely some people who feel genuinely sorry for a guy who, overnight, became known worldwide for committing a non-criminal yet hugely embarrassing "mistake", as he called it. Just what the mistake was -- jeffing-off or being caught doing it by his New Yorker colleagues -- is unclear.

Yet say you're in that "let he who hasn't sinned" group. Perhaps you would look at Toobin differently if you knew that, a decade ago, he knocked up the daughter of his CNN colleague Jeff Greenfield.  And that he urged her to get an abortion (which she refused). And then claimed he wasn't the father until a DNA test proved otherwise. And that all this happened when he was married. (By the way, what is it with Toobin, sex, and his colleagues?)

To paraphrase the old folk song, which side
are you on, Jeff?

Then there was the time he went to a swingers' club in Miami with -- gulp -- Roger Stone. Well,
sure it was for a magazine piece. They were just checking out the place where another grotesque sex hound, then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer, had a "date" with a hooker. 

But still -- Roger Goddamn Stone? And why didn't Toobin say if he and Stone found their own, er, dates while they were there? Wives want to know! And Jeff's wife likely wants to know about a woman -- described as a "well-known media figure" -- who was stalked by him up to her hotel room, where he gave her the classic line, "You know you want it". Jeff, you make an aging nerd like me feel like Warren Beatty.

Legally blind, legally guilty.

The other day, Bill Cosby resurfaced like a slimy eel from a scum-infested pond, when his latest prison mugshot was released. Looking less like America's Dad and more like the wino who stands outside 7-11 opening the door for you in hopes of a quarter, the 83 year-old "stand-up comedian, actor, author, and convicted sex offender" (as he's described on Wikipedia) struck a sad site indeed.

If you have a short memory, I mean. Jerry Seinfeld could separate Cosby the comedian from Cosby the criminal, (until he walked it back, of course), but not everyone is such a fan. For while Steve Bing was likely a low-self-esteem spendthrift, and Toobin merely a pig, Cosby was and continues to be a sociopath of the highest (or lowest) order.

 How would your typical sex criminal behave after 60 women accused him of drugging and raping them? Likely not the way Bill Cosby does. To be fair (see how empathetic I am?), Cosby, with an estimated worth of $400-million, isn't your typical sex criminal. That's why he has a Twitter page where he shills his now ironically-titled comedy special Far From Finished. He also compares himself to Martin Luther King, Jr., vents his spleen on journalists who reported his crimes, condemns the women who brought charges against him, and, in a Tweet last April, claims that he wouldn't survive COVID unless he was let out of the slammer. As Perry Mason would say, Cosby's comments are incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.

"Take me to your leader. Especially if he has $400-million."

Cosby is lucky in one respect. He found one woman who was his equal in the sociopathic department: his alien-from-another-world wife Camille. She often chimes in on his Twitter page, claiming he's in prison only due to judicial racism. Hah! Being her husband's long time manager, you can bet your last Jell-O Pudding that she knew where those years of pay-offs were going. 

As Cosby himself says of Camille on Twitter, "We have been in this fight for 55 years and counting." Who refers to their marriage as "this fight", unless they're fighting off dozens of women who were raped by this guy? 

And people think I'm obdurate. If they know what that means.

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