IT'S NOT PERSONAL, IT'S JUST BUSINESS. Tigerhawk thinks the quote from Monty Burns on the Lawyers, Guns & Money masthead is a blasphemy against the sacred tribe known as businessmen:

In the entertainment industry's conception of business success you often see this sort of idiocy -- bad guy businessmen are a staple of prime time television -- but then the entertainment industry is famously left wing.

Yeah. No one ever heard of a greedy businessman before Jane Fonda and the Viet Cong took over Hollywood.

Avarice has been a staple of comedy from the days of Plautus, and when a business class began to emerge in the West, writers such as Ben Jonson and Moliere saw no reason to exempt them from portrayals of greed and prevarication -- after all, they were after money, weren't they? By the time Mark Twain got around to lampooning shysters and Gilded Age grifters, the criminal possibilities of "legitimate" business were already well-established subjects of mockery.

This may be news to Tigerhawk, who in the comments can only trace the lineage of this trope back to "The evil business man, from the nefarious banker in 'It's a Wonderful Life' to J.R. Ewing to some virtually every other episode of 'Boston Legal'..." (That hippie bastard Frank Capra!)

The state of arts education in this country is truly pathetic. And some of our fellow-citizens understand human nature still less than that. Tigerhawk says that "the vast majority of people I know [in business] think deeply about the rights and wrongs of the tough decisions they have to make literally every day." Yeah. Maybe after a massive layoff or offshore move, a CEO will think about its impact on his (former) employees -- preferably while he's helping his Communications Director draft a statement about it, so that his feelings of sorrow might seep evocatively into the prose, and convince the business press and company officers that he has "agonized" -- a cleansing ritual that gestures respect for the old moral codes. Then it's porterhouse at Ruth's Chris, baby! Because old what's-his-name's loss, and that of all the other what's-his-nameses, is the company's gain, which is why the deed was done. Because businesses don't thrive on random acts of kindness nor on Christian love -- they thrive on profits and growth. If it can be done the easy way, well and good. If not -- (traditional guttural sound accompanying the slow drawing of one's finger across one's neck)

If "thinking deeply" were all you needed to be a decent human being, this world would be a fucking paradise.

These facts are so stunningly obvious to those of us who have been alive more than a couple of seasons, you'd think even a rightwing blogger would know them.