Billionaire businessman Tom Perkins wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal. He used an attention-grabbing comparison.

“…I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”

Tom Perkins does not have cloven hooves. Not that I have seen his feet.

Perkins sees “demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle.” He perceives “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent.” He instances “outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers,” apparently unaware that these commuters are not part of the one percent. (In 2012, Forbes pegged the top one percent as having an income of $717,000 a year and a net worth of $8.4 million. If my friends who work at Google make that, they need to take me to dinner more often.) He says people call his ex-wife, Danielle Steel, a snob despite her large philanthropic donations.

“This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

What?

Is “progressive’ radicalism unthinkable? No. Would it be a “descendant” of genocide? No.

In an interview he gave to Bloomberg News after people expressed outrage at his letter, Perkins said Kristallnacht came to mind when he saw Occupy Wall Street protesters breaking the windows of a bank and of luxury car showrooms in 2011. “I thought, well, this is how Kristallnacht began, so that word was in my mind.”

Have radicals ever broken windows in San Francisco before? Oh, honey. Where have you been?

In that long interview, twinkly Perkins said a lot of things. The subject of apology came up. He read from a letter he’d written to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL):

I deeply apologize to you and anyone who has mistaken my reference to Kristallnacht as a sign of overt or latent anti-Semitism. This is not the case….

It was a terrible misjudgment [but] I do not regret the message at all. Any time the majority starts to demonize any minority, no matter what it is, it is wrong and dangerous.

Very bad. It’s not an apology. It’s a concealed sorry-if. ‘I’m SORRY IF you DIDN’T GET IT and you WRONGLY THOUGHT I was anti-Semitic.’ And then he goes on to harp on the piteous peril of very rich people like himself.

Railroad Octopus. 1882. Hatred of the super-rich we have always with us.

After sending that worthless letter, Perkins also had a long conversation with the ADL’s Abraham Foxman. Apparently that was better. Maybe he got schooled a little. “We believe that Mr. Perkins now realizes why his Holocaust comparison was so offensive,” says an ADL statement. “He deeply regrets his words, which he made in the ‘heat of the moment,’ and has assured us that he will make efforts to publicly apologize to all those he offended. We accept his apology, and now consider the matter closed.”

In the Bloomberg interview Perkins had a lot more to say about the laws forbidding billionaires to marry non-billionaires, to own land, or engage in professions. He was eloquent on the subject of being forced to wear a green dollar sign on his outer clothing. Wait, no. None of that happened.

Okay, here’s some of what he did do: He referred to supportive email he had received – from a liberal! He said his late partner (and the “deepest of friends”) Eugene Kleiner, who had been a refugee from the Nazis, would have agreed with him. He bragged that the watch he was wearing was worth a “six-pack of Rolexes.”

He criticized the ignorance of the rabble. “I think the 99% across America should pay attention to politics, follow where it’s going, do read the newspapers. Don’t try to get everything over Twitter and Facebook. It’s not there.” (Good news, Mr. Perkins! Even if people didn’t see your letter in the Journal, it’s all over Twitter and Facebook.)

Perkins’s yacht The Maltese Falcon, 289 feet long. Sails are stored inside carbon fiber masts. Controllable by a single person. Commissioned by Perkins, who sold it in 2009. I’m sure he knew all along that its steel hull could be corroded by brimstone.

When asked about income inequality, he laid out his serene economic prescription, which is: Quit picking on the rich. “To demonize the job creators is crazy. To demonize the rich, who spend and buy things and stimulate the economy is crazy.”

Yes, without wildly disparate incomes and free-spending zillionaires, how will there be jobs wrapping gifts and running leaf-blowers and giving massages? We don’t need to make enough money to buy things, because the rich will handle all the buying.

Perkins didn’t say this, maybe because it’s too hard for the 99% of us who get all our information from Twitter to understand, but worst of all is demonizing actual demons. Actual demons, who are just trying to get things moving. Where would we be without the battle between good and evil? Lounging around the Garden of Eden in our birthday suits, not innovating or investing or anything. Crazy.