By William M.. Dowd
I was watching the latest episode of (WARNING! GUILTY PLEASURE CONFESSION ALERT!) the new TV series “Sexy Dirty Money” the other day and laughing at how outrageous and unbelievable some of the plot twists are.
In this particular one, a brother-sister set of twins who belong to the fabulously wealthy family at the center of the series wanted to rent the Brooklyn Bridge and toss a birthday party for themselves at a cost of a few million bucks.
Funny, but preposterous, I said. Things like that don’t happen in real life.
And then I read on the Jezebel.com Web site about David Brooks, “the evil defense contractor who was charged yesterday of letting troops die at the hands of his shoddy body armour so his daughter could have a $10 million bat mitzvah. What did they, hold the thing at the local International Space Station?”
But, the blogger went on, maybe Brooks didn’t get as much for his money as he might have. To wit:
“Yeah, so 50 Cent and Aerosmith performed. $10 million could buy you practically an entire year of Madonna performances, and you’d get to share in her perfume sales. So what, did they give out Birkin goodie bags? (If Hermes even manufactured $10 million worth of Birkin bags in a year that might be a possibility, but they don’t.)
” … Ranting and raving about how David Brooks ripped off the American taxpayer and sold out the military all so his daughter could make it into the Guinness Book of JAP is distracting us from the real fraud: David Brooks was robbed. This was maybe a ten million Hong Kong Dollar soiree at best, and some rogue party planner is laughing all the way to the bank. Your only choice is to laugh with her.”
(Posted 10/26/07)
William M. Dowd is a Capital Region writer and photographer. Besides this blog on current events, he’ll help you keep up with information on food, drink and destinations at Taste for Travel and Dowd On Drinks.