Thank you Hillary!

Diane Sawyer: “It has been reported you’ve made $5 million making speeches, the president’s made more than $100 million.”

Hillary Clinton: “You have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education, you know, it was not easy. Bill has worked really hard and it’s been amazing to me. He’s worked very hard, first of all, we had to pay off all our debts which was, you know, we had to make double the money because of obviously taxes, and pay you have at debts, and get us houses and take care of family members.”

Many years ago in Oklahoma a bud of mine and I were watching an episode of the mini-series “Jennie,” about the life of Jennie Randolph Churchill, Winston’s American mother.

So we’re watching this scene where Jennie and her second husband George are sitting in the dining room of this mansion pouring brandy from cut-crystal decanters and George is wallowing in how he realizes what a failure he is.

“My sisters are eating off of gold plate, and I can’t even keep up the payments on my ancestral estate,” he moans.

Of course we laughed fit to die.

Thank you Hillary I thought I’d never laugh like that again.

Hillary has made as much as $200,000 for a speech. As in, One. Speech.

For $200,000 I could buy a piece of property near here between the mountains and a river, put up a log home on it, and live in it for quite some time before I had to go back to work.

The really side-splittingly hilarious thing about this is – Hillary most likely believes this!

Many years ago (in Oklahoma again) I heard Tom Wolfe give a talk at our university. Apropos of something-or-other Wolfe talked about Jackie Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis and how shocked and disappointed people were that America’s princess could marry that decrepit old Greek.

Wolfe’s take on it was that Jackie probably thought Onassis was a fascinating man, at least at first. He said there are levels of rich. The generic rich we see, and the rich other rich look up to with an awe we cannot understand.

That is, there’s the rich who can afford several houses and servants to staff one of them. Then there’s the rich who can afford several houses, each with its own full-time staff of servants.

Wolfe said we peons can’t understand the agony the merely rich feel when they have to tell the servants to pack because we’re moving to the Swiss chalet for the skiing season. And how much they look up to the super-rich who can just pop in to the villa in Cannes for a few weeks a year, knowing it’s fully staffed and waiting for them all the time.

Of course what popped into my mind was, how do I get a job in one of those villas?

We live in a democratic age. Meaning that we are still ruled by aristocrats, but to rule they have to pretend they are “one of us” even though it’s painfully obvious they are nothing of the sort.

They are out of touch and clueless about how out of touch they are. They may yet destroy our civilization.

But in the meantime they provide us with some great laughs from time to time.