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The Weekly Standard's new cover story speaks up for the voiceless the billionaire libertarian ideologues, David and Charles Koch. It's a long read, and well worth your time. To whet your appetite, here are a few of my favorite excerpts.
Like this one, on the Koch brothers' do-gooding:
Like most billionaires, the brothers spend a lot of time giving their money away: to medical and scientific research, to educational programs, to cultural institutions, and to public policy research and activism.
Or this one, which craftily uses a conservative bogeyman as a way to paint liberals as hysterical witch hunters:
Fred was a member of the John Birch Society. The Birchers, famously drummed out of the conservative movement by William F. Buckley Jr., believed that Communist infiltration spread all the way to the top of the U.S. government, including the Eisenhower presidency. Fred Koch’s conspiratorial worldview, in other words, anticipated the manner in which liberal writers would describe his sons decades later.
Or this, which includes a cameo appearance by one Ms. Rachel Maddow:
What happened to the Kochs was a classic example. A young researcher at the Center for American Progress noticed that some Tea Party rallies had been organized by Americans for Prosperity. On April 9, 2009, he wrote up his discovery and posted it on a Center for American Progress Action Fund blog under the headline “Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping to Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests.” Here was the definitive proof, he wrote, that the yokels in tricornes were only pawns of moneyed interests. A little googling revealed that Charles and David Koch had been active in politics for decades, that they’d given money to all sorts of conservative causes, that they operated—this was almost too good to be true—an energy company that had had run-ins with the EPA. Sound the alarm! Rachel Maddow is on line one!
Or this, on the Koch brothers' sacrifices for the greater good:
It was impossible for the liberal activists to acknowledge that libertarians might actually operate from conviction. Charles and David believed in low taxes, less spending, and limited regulation not because those policies helped them but because they helped everybody. “If I wanted to enhance my riches,” said David, “why do I give away almost all my money?
More fun after the jump!
Or this, on how liberals can be just as scary and intimidating as the worst of the right-wing activists:
No amount of contrary evidence was enough to dislodge the left’s conviction that Charles and David Koch ran an empire hellbent on America’s destruction. Koch addiction was too powerful. As the media campaign intensified, demonstrators started showing up at the Koch campus in Wichita. A left-wing blogger ambushed David when he traveled to Washington to see the 112th Congress sworn in. The liberal group Common Cause organized a protest at the most recent Koch fundraising seminar in Palm Springs. The lefties outside the hotel unfurled a white banner with the words “Koch Kills” printed in red. Drops of blood fell from each letter. “These people were very, very extreme,” David said, “and I think very dangerous.”
Or this, on why liberals just don't get it:
To Charles, the call for bigger government was egalitarianism run amok. Liberals, he thought, fetishized equality of condition at the expense of personal liberty. “They cannot stand that some people are better off than others,” Charles said. “I think part of it fits Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: someone that’s miserable because he knows that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself. He cannot stand that. And I think they all slept through Economics 101.”
What are your favorite parts?
