T. Boone gave up on wind power, which was a nice little land-grab scheme and PR boost, but the wind was always a front for his natural gas interests.

And you know, we could find some examples of Arianna Huffington and everyone else on that site decrying the Swift Boat attacks of 2004, or even just using "Swift Boat" as a shorthand for incredibly underhanded smear campaigns that are hurting America, and then we could point out that this man who is blogging about the Green-ness of his current attempt to have the federal government give him money is the same man who funded that Swift Boat campaign, but it's Friday, who has that kind of time?

Well, ok, we do.

Pickens made a lot of money with oil, and then decided that wind farms were an even better way to make money. Because he is a capitalist Republican conservative, he thought his best bet for making a profit on wind power was to get a shitload of money from the government. And so, despite his years of partisan donations and funding of smear campaigns he suddenly played Mr. Concerned Citizen Environmentalist during the 2008 presidential campaign, earning him important meetings with Bloomberg, Obama, McCain, and Harry Reid.

But! Wind power turned out to not even be worth the effort of pretending to care about it as a front for taking lots of government money to build natural gas pipelines, so he is giving up on his "world's largest wind farm" plan. Because, hey, natural gas prices fell, and the money being handed out to people pretending to free us from foriegn oil dried up, and the gub'mint won't pay for his transmission lines until 2013.

We'd expect him to informally advise Giuliani. Pickens, the old oilman, is a longtime funder of Republicans. He very very famously is responsible for those Swift Boat people who lied about John Kerry. He's spent the last 30 years ensuring that his business-friendly Republican friends remained in power, and now the old man spends millions pushing... wind power? Alternative energy? It almost sounds like environmentalism! Why waste time trying to convince Republicans to... act like liberals??

The oilman has given up oil, you see. Now he's investing millions in wind power and natural gas. Both are less environmentally terrible than petroleum, but his magic windmill plan does not seem to us to be very viable. Because there's a lot of wind in those big empty plains states, yes, but not any people. So transporting this power across the entire country adds even more to this power's price tag and enriches T. Boone and his investors yet more!

But merits of his plan aside, the question is why Democrats like Reid and Obama are giving the jackass the time of day and legitimizing him as anything other than a zillionaire who thinks the presidency and now the energy policy of this country are his to buy. Start a think tank or something dude, don't just get all "rogue vigilante billionaire crisis-solver"!

And further, why the hell aren't anyone but random columnists and Cato Institute libertarians examining his plan seriously and reporting on his conflicts of interest?

Hell in a week's worth of stories entirely about how important famous elected officials are meeting with Pickens, only today's Obama stories even mention the Swift Boat Veterans.

What the hell, T. Boone Pickens. Just because you're rich doesn't mean everyone has to take you seriously.

Pickens and Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon are about to convince California voters to fork over $5 billion in a ballot proposition called the "California Alternative Fuels Initiative." It's really a giveaway to natural gas developers like Pickens and McClendon.

Good thing he's sticking to energy, an industry he understands. When last we heard from the iconic corporate raider, he was busy losing piles of money on Yahoo and cursing the company's management.

That debacle forgotten, of late he's has been getting more media attention for his role in massive projects under the catchy "Pickens Plan."

Part of that plan is California's Proposition 10, due for a vote in November. Pickens and McClendon have spent only $3.7 million so far promoting the $5 billion bond measure, according to the Wall Street Journal. If it passes, that's one heck of a return on investment.

The plan will ultimately cost taxpayers $8.9 billion and raise sales taxes with no guarantees that the state will actually see much of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. You'd think environmentalists would have seen through Pickens "reformed oil man" facade, but you'd be wrong: With less than three months until the issue is due for a vote, no formal opposition has emerged.

Pickens is a pro at bending state politics to his will. His plan to drill for groundwater in the Texas panhandle and sell it to Dallas residents met with opposition from ecologists and landowners, since it required a 250-mile straw to drink up the Ogallala aquifer's milkshake.

So Pickens slapped some wind-turbine generators onto the plan, and with the help of some changes to local laws, managed to place himself at the head of a new water district with the power of eminent domain in order to seize the necessary land across the dusty Texas plains for the pipeline. It's the kind of move that you would think would provoke bipartisan disgust — natural-resource exploitation, to offend the liberals, with the abuse of eminent domain for private gain, to piss off the conservatives.

Instead, the longtime Republican who helped swiftboat Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry is winning green points amongst conservatives by promising "energy independence" from foreign oil. And Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D.-San Francisco, is an investor in Pickens's Clean Energy Fuels. As such, she stands to profit from the deal as well, effectively silencing the state and national Democratic Party on the issue

Our ten-gallon hats are off to the man for suckering both sides of the aisle into giving him what he wants and the public into thinking he's motivated by anything more than greed. Well played, Mr. Pickens, well played.

In 2004, he was behind the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," a group that claimed that not only was John Kerry not a war hero, but in fact he had never even been to Vietnam, or even on a boat, as boats made him seasick, because he is French. He actually spent the majority of the 60s and 70s making love to Jane Fonda on a burning American flag.

Now John Kerry did not really respond to these claims very effectively or quickly, but part of that was surely because he did not expect these sort of goofy attack ads to suddenly become serious topics of impassioned debate on the television, giving them exposure far beyond what Mr. Pickens actually paid for.

And the Times reported recently that Pickens is welshing on a million dollar bet he offered to anyone who could disprove the claims of the Swift Boat people. The Times also said: "Extensive media accounts undermined the Swift Boat charges in 2004, pointing out that some of the Swift Boat critics had written statements during Vietnam lauding Mr. Kerry for extraordinary bravery in the incidents they later said he made up." MediaMatters is upset (su-prise, su-prise, su-prise! Charles Durning as T. Boone Pickens might say here) because the extensive undermining thing did not really happen until well after most media outlets simply repeated all the claims without context, 500,000 times. Though to be fair, the Times largely ignored the Swift Boat people, because they, like Kerry, thought they were so ridiculous, so it was more of a sin of omission.

But one man who did publicly criticize and refute the claims of this terrible group of liars is American Hero John McCain! He fought in Vietnam too, you may remember, so he is pretty confident that it actually happened and John Kerry was there.

Now, though, McCain is happily accepting money from the people who funded these terrible lies he denounced in 2004. Because he's a MAVERICK. McCain also brought out Swift Boat member Bud Day for a conference call on Monday. Day was there to respond to the terrible lies Wesley Clark made about McCain's war service, because irony is dead.

But here is some good news: T. Boone Pickens, as a proper old-fashioned evil Texas oil billionaire, still quietly hates John McCain and will not be donating any money to anyone this year.