TomFlannery.com

When I started reading the headlines about rich people using their money to gain unfair advantages for their spoiled douchey kids, I scrolled right past the way I scroll past articles about Trump saying something stupid. I’m unclear why this is even considered newsworthy.

Of course rich people, most of whom have gotten rich by being sketchy in the first place, use their money to influence all sorts of situations that would normally require……like…hard work and stuff. I must say that spending a cool half million to buy scholarship spots on a college crew team for your 2 daughters, neither of whom has ever stepped on a boat before, doesn’t exactly scream “high parental SAT score”, but then neither does being known for playing second fiddle to John Stamos. Subsequently marrying a fashion designer with a net worth of $80 million doesn’t make you any smarter. It just means you get to do your makeup and choose your wardrobe before the FBI arrests you.

We’ve all heard about kids in academically prestigious schools, schools with acceptance rates in the single digits, and wondered how they could possibly get in without being able to recite the ABCs or read a wall clock. And I’m not talking about the ones who can tomahawk dunk or run for 200 yards a game. (Athletics are a special category, where classes are as optional as actually graduating, and under-the-table payments might force you to actually take a pay cut when you become a professional.) I’m talking about the random dolts who couldn’t get a 1600 on an SAT if they took it 5 times and added up the scores. Their only qualification, inevitably is coming from a family that has gobs of money. Of course these kids are stealing a spot from somebody way more qualified, but from the college admission perspective, the kids left out were too dumb to be born to rich parents so….fuck them.

Generally money is enough. There’s no need to doctor SAT scores, so this part is a bit confusing to me. You can only chalk this up to astounding hubris….the “my kid scores this”……type of hubris that separates the normal rich asshole parents from the supersonic rich asshole parents.

Even a school as pretentiously self-important as Harvard has their price. The fact that it took the slimy Kushner family a $2.5 million bribe to get Mr Ivanka Trump enrolled gives new definition to the term “the best and the brightest”. This is definitely not a case where more is better. Can you imagine how much of a fucking idiot your son must be if it takes $2.5 million of your hard earned stolen money to get him into a school?

Stunning how so many were involved in this scheme….at all levels. Apparently there is nobody left in the US who can’t be bought, from college admission directors, to coaches, to some blue collar schlub at the table set up at the SAT testing school, willing to wave the 50 year old white haired guy with the picture ID of the 17 year old girl past. But a hung- over college kid with bad time management skills who cuts and pastes sections of a Wikipedia page and forgets to add a footnote will be dragged before some insufferable academic board and systematically filleted.

Sounds fair.

But then again….ho hum. Catching a few Hollywood middling starlets (interesting how the husbands aren’t being pillared though, isn’t it? Things that make you go hmmm…) dumb enough to put their dumbness on display in traceable emails is not going to change the fact that while the earth is round (people who don’t believe this get into colleges too….), it is not fair. At all. Rich kids will always have the advantage over our kids. Our kids will work hard and work fair and follow the rules, and they’ll be allotted the scraps that fall off corporate tables.

And when they leave college, they will deal with dumb rich people in positions of authority over them for the rest of their lives. This is just the beginning, so they might as well learn it now.

The game is rigged Bubba. The only way to end this is to burn it all to the ground.

It’s said there is no replacement for hard work, but those who say that don’t have the ability to simply cut a check.

In a bit..

–tf