William Shatner and Jeff Bezos’ flights of fancy

Environmental icon Jeff Bezos blasted his buddy
William Shatner into space last week on Bezos’ rocket ship, “Blue Origins.” They
used tons of fuel and discharged the huge metal rocket that held the fuel back onto
Earth. Since it was from Amazon’s founder, the package discharged from this
journey landed broken and on the wrong person’s porch.

The 65-mile “space” trip lasted 10 minutes — not long
enough to have a glass of Tang. This set the record for Democrats spending the
most money for a 10-minute, self-indulgent thrill ride, surpassing Bill Clinton
and Bill Gates’ visit to Jeffrey Epstein Island.

Bezos, described by both himself and the toy newspaper
he bought, The Washington ComPost, as an “environmentalist,” is the same
guy who built Amazon. You know, the company that puts the batteries you order
in a box the size of a dorm room refrigerator and delivers it to your
neighbor’s house in Amazon trucks that billow diesel smoke all through your
neighborhood. Yet we have somehow been gaslighted into believing that this lefty
is a “champion” of the environment.

Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Richard
Branson and now Jeff Bezos, mid-life crisis billionaire nerds, feel compelled
to fly themselves for the world to see in phallic-symbol big rockets the
distance of a Delta Commuter jet ride from Augusta to Atlanta. Just how bad has
Earth gotten when the United States’ richest men want to get the heck out of here?

All these billionaires are spending their money to one-up
each other 65 miles above Earth. Remember when buying an NFL team or doing
cocaine was a sign you were making too much money?

Anyone watching these “Blue” rockets cannot help but
think of a Viagra ad. There is something Freudian at play here. The week after
watching the rocket rumble into space, women all over the world were ordering
the Bezos “Blue Origins” model for themselves. I had no idea so many women were
suddenly interested in outer space.

Even the left criticized the race by billionaires to
monkey around in space. Prince Harry, now in California to flee the racism of
England, said that “repairing the Planet Earth should come before such personal
space trips.” For their part, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markel, made
that statement in their 50,000th interview with paying TV hosts to say how much
they just want their privacy.

To be fair, I do like that the private sector is
spending money to explore space instead of the bloated dopes in our federal space
agency, NASA. Bezos says he has over $100 million booked in space travel by
rich men for his company, which is a good way to fund research. The only rich
old white guy who is more often in outer space than these Bezos and Musk is Joe
Biden.

One of my favorites,
William Shatner (who was celebrating his 90th birthday), was on this
latest Bezos rocket trip. Bezos was on the ground to welcome Shatner back to Earth,
and to wish him a happy 90th and his hair a happy 50th. We
have spent trillions of dollars on space exploration and we have Tang and
Velcro to show for them. On this trip, scientists set out to determine the
strength of Velcro in zero-gravity by gauging its ability to keep Shatner’s
toupee in place.

West Texas, a zero-income
tax state into which these tax-and-spend liberals like Bezos and Musk seem to
want to put their income, had high winds the day of launch. I trust they were
talking about the 25 mph west winds and not Shatner’s.

People in California do
admire William Shatner. The Kardashians have a wood-paneled library in their
8,000-square-foot home with a complete collection of the entire works of
William Shatner.

I do like William
Shatner. He has made a lot of money in Priceline stock, for which company he
was the early spokesman. Ever the businessman, Shatner learned in his space
travel about the science of incontinence. His next big venture is a diaper sewn
into pants for the aging U.S. adult population. The slogan could be “Americans
can then boldly go where no man has gone before.” He will also have a
special line of these slacks designed just for women. I think he will call that
line “Shatner Pants.”

Ron Hart is a syndicated op-ed humorist,
award-winning author, and TV/radio commentator; you can reach him at Ron@RonaldHart.com or
Twitter @RonaldHart.