Tom Rants

A few times a year I'll get a hateful comment or a bit of hate email accusing me of being out of touch with the common man. The usual comment is along the lines of «rich Republicans like you have no idea what it's like to...» fill in the blank. I am, you see, a Dot Com Thousandaire and some people find that kind of quadruple digit wealth infuriating.

I thought it would be fun to share a few items from the lifestyle of rich Republicans like myself here on the interwebs. Maybe I'll even get a few details out there on The Google.

For the first installment, I thought I'd share what rich Republicans like myself drive. Keep reading to see my new car:

It's a 2009 Hyundai Accent GS 3-Door. That's apparently the new politically correct term for what patriarchal rich Republicans call a «hatchback».

It's the base model. It is, the absolute cheapest car on the market in the US. (Since Nissan raised the price on the Versa and Hyundai cut the price on the Accent.) $9,970. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

It gets 35 MPG, which is about as good as it gets without spending roughly twice the money for a Toyota Prius. Don't get excited thinking I've gone enviroweenie though. This is simply a matter of what we rich Republicans really care about - dollars! I drive five to six hundred miles a week and gas costs money. But, still, next time some SUV driving liberal hypocrite starts to lecture me on global warming, she is getting referred to this post.

This is where the radio would be if I had spent the $2,500 to go above the base model, but rich Republicans don't do that sort of thing. I have a cheap mp3 player and earbuds.

There's one way that this cheap car absolutely proves that I'm a rich Republican. I'm told that there's a credit crunch and only the wealthiest, least risky among us can get credit. Especially zero down or, in the parlance of subprime real estate lending, 100% Loan-to-value credit. But like all rich Republicans I like to keep my hundreds safe in FDIC insured accounts rather than spending them, so 100% LTV was strictly necessary. So, I went for the Republican version of the Friends of Angelo. Not from Countrywide Home Loans, of course. From Capital One Auto Loans by way of Lending Tree. What's in your wallet? I must have put in some sort of Republican secret code because I got approved for the loan in about 5 minutes at 5 AM on a Monday morning at the height of scarce credit.

Here's another picture, just because: