The apprentice

There’s nothing to whipping a fool. Hell, fools were made to be whipped. But to take another pro, even your partner, who knows you and has his eyes on you — that’s a score.

The Grifters

This makes me sort of sad:

Sarah Palin’s political action committee has begun fundraising off the former governor’s endorsement of Donald Trump for president. An email sent Wednesday from SarahPAC calls Palin’s backing of the Republican frontrunner “historic” and touts itself as planning to “continue endorsing anti-establishment candidates who will not play politics as usual.” And then the call for donations: “In order to get Sarah to political events to support endorsed candidates we need your help to fundraise her travel.” According to Politico, the fundraising email is especially unusual because presidential campaigns typically foot the bill to travel their surrogates to campaign events.

[emphasis added]

Palin’s PAC is of course a straight-up grift:

What did SarahPAC spend most of its money on, then, in the third quarter? Many of the same consultants she has used all along — for speechwriting, fundraising, logistics and research. There’s even someone paid to consult on “coalitions.” Travel, presumably for Palin, is part of the equation; a PAC like this is useful for keeping a high profile nationally without having to pay those pesky airline and hotel tabs out of personal funds. And the PAC sent $10,885 to HarperCollins — publisher of all three of Palin’s books — for “books for donor fulfillment.” That wasn’t the only book purchase by the committee: A lump sum of $13,000 was listed as being spent for “lodging, SUV rental, books for donors.”

Palin’s net worth is probably in the tens of millions, which is admittedly chump change in comparison to her new best friend’s immense fortune (That Donald Trump isn’t even picking up Palin’s Iowa travel tab is on one level the very definition of chutzpah — or as Ted Cruz would put it, “New York values” — but on another it can be seen as a sort of perverse gesture of mutual recognition that one grifter makes to another).

Anyway what makes me melancholy is the thought of all the gullible, poorly informed, eminently exploitable people these two utterly shameless thieves have ripped off with their various brands of (needless to say, perfectly legal) thievery. It’s very easy for progressives to have nothing but contempt for the sort of people who send $20 out of their social security check to Sarah Palin, but that contempt should be leavened with the realization that the personal and political fortunes of people like Trump and Palin are built on the ruthless exploitation of the sort of ignorance, fear, and desperation that Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and their ilk have spent years cultivating, while getting rich themselves.