Awww, poor widdle Koch brothers -- victims of "the buzz saw of the contemporary left"

highplainsdem

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Sun Mar-27-11 04:57 PM
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Awww, poor widdle Koch brothers -- victims of "the buzz saw of the contemporary left"

Welcome once again to the alternate self-contained right-wing media universe, this time courtesy of the Weekly Standard's Koch-kissing paean to these unappreciated hardworking men who've been so mistreated by everyone on the left who's written about them.

:nopity:

As long as the buzz saw is on a roll....

You have to read this piece, by the Weekly Standard's opinion editor, Matthew Continetti, who even Politico is willing to point out was "the recipient of a 2008 fellowship from a foundation that has received at least $165,000 from Charles G. Koch Foundation since 2002." Just the guy you'd trust to write an objective article on the Kochs, right?

The piece is called "The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics" and it's worth reading just for its alternate-media-universe amusement value:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/paranoid-style-liberal-politics_555525.html

The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics
The left’s obsession with the Koch brothers
Apr 4, 2011
By Matthew Continetti

-snip-

This institution-building coincided with the rise of the blogosphere. Over the last decade the left took to the Internet like conservatives at a gun show: They felt right at home. By 2006 the progressive bloggers (the term “liberal” had too many negative connotations) had become a powerful force. They called themselves the Netroots, organized conferences, pooled resources, and played a key role in forcing Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic party. The Internet served as a virtual community for liberals who’d lacked a sense of belonging. The web’s immediacy allowed writers to connect, comment, propose, report, fact-check, and update in real time. No utterance from a Republican, no matter how banal, went unexamined.

By the time the Tea Party was getting started in 2009, the left-wing counter-counter-establishment was a juggernaut, investing vast energy in destroying the reputations of its favorite targets: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh. Inside this Death Star were legions of twenty-something writers, most of them fresh out of college, tapping furiously at their keyboards, discoursing on the subtleties of macroeconomics and the depravity of American conservatives. An hour or so spent on Google was research enough to write a blog post that would be read by producers for Keith Olbermann and editors at the New York Times. Seemingly random accumulations of fact would be presented breathlessly in purple prose: Look at what the bastards are doing now! In a matter of hours attacks that originated in the bowels of the Center for American Progress Action Fund would traverse heaven’s ladder and reach White House speechwriters.

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!

-snip-

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.”

-snip-

Continetti informs us that even the Kochs' employees are "hurt and befuddled."

Anyway, the very, VERY paranoid alternate self-contained right-wing media universe is now spending extra time defending and praising the Kochs. Continetti tries, for instance, to defend David Koch for having an obvious conflict of interest in sitting on the National Cancer Advisory Board at the same time one of his companies was lobbying against designating formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=10

And he tries to argue that instead of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity being behind the Tea Party, "If anything it was the Tea Partiers who used Americans for Prosperity."

Poor little billionaires. Taken advantage of so often...

I'm sure all of you "twenty-something writers" here inside the "the left-wing counter-counter-establishment" "Death Star" with me will feel very sorry for them, now that Continetti has explained what nice guys they really are.