Watched the debate, of course. That isn't what compelled me to comment. Instead, it was one of the commercials, afterward.
It occurs to me that T. Boone Pickens, he of the endless pockets for swift boat liars, the rampant greed, crappy politics, boosterism (for a program that hasn't seen the heights of success in any of the boosted sports since Eddie Sutton, but I digress), and the smarmy, rat-faced demeanor, has been allowed to take over leadership of the debate on alternative energy.
And of course, it's drilldrilldrill, then natural gas, then 'you all smart people who can waitress your way into college'll think up somethin'.
I normally wouldn't care if he lifted it part and parcel from the Sierra Club, or even more, if he's right. I can ignore him just as easily as anybody else.
But the asshole paid some OK State student to cobble him together a message board, ran a couple of commercials, and suddenly he's our thought leader on alt energy?
Uh, I fucking object.
If you were to put in order of merit, everybody you know of who had a plan's PLAN, whose plan is first?
Me, no question - if it's not Barack Obama's, it's Al Gore's, and the other one is probably second. There's Schweitzer's, and I'm sure it's all 'behold the power of coal,' but if he can trap pollutants, I trust him. So that's up there.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Sierra Club and other similarly affiliated groups, actually DID have codified energy policy beyond bullet points, or even research. Thousand Friends, all those guys. And they're all probably very good plans. So they'd fill out the rest of the first tier.
Most student-authored plans are probably in the second tier, and I have a strong hunch that the majority of them echo what Pickens wants to do, so that's where the PickensPlan belongs.
But dude has got money, so we get to hear him bumble around and pimp his website as if getting together and posting stupid stuff in threads is going to get us off foreign oil.
Hypersensitive, maybe, but little galls me more than that; it's demeaning and condescending in its own right, as if a website about it should be all you ever get.
T. Boone Pickens probably picked up his first mouse last week. But as happens a lot with old white men with outsized egos and even larger wallets, they often take to describing themselves as "thought leaders."
I ain't sayin', I'm just sayin': He's not MY thought leader. NO WAY has he earned that.
I'd object even more if he was successful in moving all the good talk there. That's not where it needs to go - T. Boone has to realize that people out there have better plans than he does, and let it go.
Pushing the PickensPlan doesn't help America: it only helps T. Boone Pickens.