Washington Times:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is prepared to spend an unprecedented $1 billion of his own $5.8 billion personal fortune for a third-party presidential campaign, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Tuesday in The Washington Times.

“He has set aside $1 billion to go for it,” a long-time business adviser to Mr. Bloomberg tells The Times. “The thinking about where it will come from and do we have it is over, and the answer is yes, we can do it.”

The $1 billion would represent about one-fifth of Mr. Bloomberg’s personal fortune.

Last Sunday, RINO Chuck Hagel was speculating on Face the Nation about sharing a ticket with Bloomberg. link

Hagel is better-known nationally, so I naturally assumed that Bloomberg was considering the VP slot on that Third Party ticket, but if Bloomberg will be ponying up a billion dollars, his plans must be the other way around.

There is clearly something about the media-saturated atmosphere of Manhattan which induces excessive vanity. Not one, but two, NYC mayors think that their local office atop a governmental dunghill of corruption, bureaucracy, and political featherbedding is likely to be regarded nationally as an appropriate stepping-stone to the presidency of the United States. They are both sadly mistaken.

But if Michael Bloomberg is sufficiently self-infatuated and frivolous enough to waste that kind of money to get into the history books somewhere south of Alf Landon, more power to him. He will really wind up playing the role of Ralph Nader in recent elections, sucking away a small percentage of the votes of airheads who would otherwise be voting for the democrat.

I do think that he ought to ask Donald Trump to be his running-mate though, instead of Chuck Hagel.

Nebraska RINO Chuck Hagel, who has complied a record of anti-Republican votes and defeatism that Lincoln Chafee might envy, observed yesterday on Face the Nation that, in his view, the Republican Party had been hijacked away from its core values (presumably those of Liberal “Me-Too” Republicanism) by “extremists.”

In an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Hagel expansively speculated about running as a Third Party candidate, a move he predicted would be good for the American political system. Schieffer then turned the conversation to discussing prospects of a joint run with New York City’s Anti-Gun-crusading, Anti-Nicotine-Nazi Mayor Bloomberg.

Hagel was delighted by the idea, and grew misty-eyed over the generosity of the America which could offer such opportunities to some very rich and powerful “boys” from Nebraska and New York.

As John Wayne used to say: That’ll be the day.