Last July, a Rutgers business professor spotted Asness dining with Republican Representative Paul Ryan at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill. The professor, Susan Feinberg, couldn’t resist going over to their table and asking Ryan how he could reconcile ordering two $350 bottles of Pinot Noir at a time when he was proposing to slash safety-net spending. Ryan mumbled a response—“Is that how much it was?”—but Asness tore into Feinberg, capping his rant with a “fuck her.” “He seemed genuinely pissed off,” Feinberg told me. “He started keying up the rhetoric—‘You go and tell your liberal friends … .’ Doing that thing where you point your finger really hard.”
Afterwords
In his story, MacGillis makes the hedge fund managers sound like so many John Galts, or rather they make themselves sound that way. It’s clear that the gay romance between John and Barack was too hot not to cool down. It was just one of those things.
*Denied the great stuff, Charlie is forced to settle for the good stuff—a bottle of Gavi di Gavi—which is “like a good Montrachet,” he claims. And even if it isn’t quite that good, at least it’s a varietal. “Varietal means expensive,” Murray tells FT. And everybody knows that “expensive” means “good”! Especially AEI assholes like Charlie Murray!
†I stole this joke from Don Marquis (Archie and Mehitabel, look it up), who came up with it back in the early days of Prohibition.
