Politics is a strange racket for an overcaffeinated billionaire by the name of Howard Schultz to enter …
especially when he lacks the good sense to know that a billionaire shouldn't slam Kamala Harris' advocacy of Medicare for All — i.e., health insurance for all — as "not American," or demean Elizabeth Warren's "wealth tax" — i.e., fairness — as "ridiculous."
Schultz's attacks are absent of class, in that they're also altogether absent of human decency. The very least a coffee-bean billionaire can do for the society he has peeled for years is to acquire a little class. Otherwise he's just an undertaxed novelty to that society.
When I first read that Schultz was interested in a presidential campaign, I thought, perhaps he is filled with what he believes to be magnificent ideas for bettering America; perhaps it isn't just ego. You never know. This morning, however, I caught a couple minutes of Schultz on "Morning Joe," and my initial thought was fatally punctured by Schultzian emptiness.
He espoused not one even mediocre idea; he mostly sat there proclaiming his love for country and how a nonpartisan, Horatio Alger kind of guy could really inspire America to do better.
In short, he had nothing other than bullshit. But Howard is bored, I gather — bored by the billions and badly in need of assembled adulation, of Donald's sort. If that idiot can attract it, Schultz must have thought, well, surely any idiot can attract it. And so here he is … threatening to help to keep America's worst nightmare in highest office.
All so Howard can get some kicks.
So many of the superrich and their in-the-news escapades remind me of Fitzgerald's concluding lines in his best-known book; and today, I'm thinking of Howard Schultz:
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, [Howard and his wife, Sheri] — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.