David Harsanyi notes that today’s liberals think that their own position enjoys monopoly control of Reason, Science, intellectual curiosity, and ordinary human benevolence. If you disagree with them about Global Warming, Planned Parenthood, Obamacare, or the desirability of electing democrats, it cannot possibly be on the basis of legitimate disagreement, you have to have been paid off by the Koch Brothers.

Conservatives may be ethically compromised, uninformed or—if liberals are in a generous mood—mentally unstable, but they can’t be for real. At least, that’s the sense I increasingly get from the left these days. Blame it on social media.
When a group confuses its politics with moral doctrine, it may have trouble comprehending how a decent human could disagree with its positions. This is probably why people confuse lecturing with debating and why so many liberals can bore into the deepest nooks of my soul to ferret out all those motivations but can’t waste any time arguing about the issue itself.

Are you also corrupt? Probably. Bought off by big oil, big food or big something or other? Washington is teeming with Manchurian candidates, because no one could possibly be this malicious on his own. Why should liberals debate a point when they can debate your imaginary sugar daddy? Why else would conservatives “hate workers”? Why would they “bet against America”? Why do they want to destroy democracy? Why would conservatives vote against their own interests? Someone pays them to lie.

CATO’s Massachusetts Avenue building in DC

I was reading this morning The Washingtonian’s gossipy account of the ongoing Ed Crane-Koch Brothers struggle for control of Cato Institute. The saga was a predictable enough story revolving around the often-inevitable friction produced by the interaction of colorful personalities and over-sized egos.

“Why can’t we all just get along?” I was wondering to myself until I came up to the part of the account describing what is usually spoken of as “the Koch Brothers’ nefarious attempt to pack Cato’s board with non-libertarians.”

In December 2010, Charles Koch called the first meeting of Cato’s shareholders since 1981. Cato now had four shareholders: Charles and David Koch, Ed Crane, and William Niskanen, Cato’s aging chairman emeritus. The Kochs used their shares to appoint two new directors to Cato’s board: Nancy Pfotenhauer and Kevin Gentry.

Crane and Niskanen were stunned. Pfotenhauer was a former spokesperson for Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign. She had supported the Iraq War and the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—positions that run counter to libertarian ideals. Kevin Gentry was vice chairman of the Virginia Republican Party and a top executive at the Charles Koch Foundation.

“Whatever they are, they are not libertarians,” says Bob Levy, Cato’s board chairman.

And, then I blew my top.

I have always considered myself a libertarian. Regular readers here will observe the appearance of regular postings indicating a strong sentimental attachment to Ayn Rand. I’m opposed to Big Government, most taxes and regulation, and all victimless crime laws. If it were up to me, we’d roll just about all of our ways of doing things right back to the point they were at before the Progressive Movement came along. In my ideal America, the federal government would occupy a campus the size of one of those affluent California high schools and you could buy heroin from vending machines with gold coins featuring images of Indians, mythical beings, and Big Game animals.

But, lo and behold, I find today that, according to Ed Crane and the merry band of liberaltarians at Cato, if you are not a peace creep/pacifist and a subscriber to the homosexual political movement’s complete agenda, you have been re-defined, at some point in time when I wasn’t paying attention, as “not a libertarian.”

Well, Go, Koch Brothers! is all I have to say. The sooner control of so-called libertarian institutions is returned to libertarians who are still part of the Conservative Movement the better.

My own opinion is that the left-leaning soi disant libertarians who eagerly hasten to defend the supposed rights of terrorists and the cause of America’s overseas enemies, the kind of libertarians who embrace the use of government for coercive social engineering, the kind of libertarians who prize moral latitudinarianism and egalitarianism above liberty represent essentially a kind of liberal fifth column, functioning most effectively in confusing the issues and dividing the opposition to statism and the Jacobin left.

William Koch (one of the notorious conservative donor Koch Brothers) bought the 2×3″ ferrotype taken by an unknown photographer in Fort Sumner, New Mexico in late 1879 or early 1880 at a Denver auction last Saturday.

This carte de visite image, commonly referred to as the Upham tintype (named for its longtime owner Frank Upham, a nephew of the original owner Dan Dedrick, one of Billy the Kid’s outlaw friends) is the only image of the famous Western gunfighter believed by experts to be authentic.

Wikipedia article on the Kid, which discusses the photograph.

New Mexico Tourism’s detailed discussion of the photograph.

Charles & David Koch

epistemicfail knows.

The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That’s small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren’t enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:

1. decriminalize drugs,
2. legalize gay marriage,
3. repeal the Patriot Act,
4. end the police state,
5. cut defense spending.

Who hates the police? Only the criminals using drugs, amirite? We need the Patriot Act to allow government to go through our emails and tap our phones to catch people who smoke marijuana and put them in prison. Oh, it’s also good for terrorists.

Wikipedia shows Koch Family Foundations supporting causes like:

1. CATO Institute
2. Reason Foundation
3. cancer research ($150 million to M.I.T. – STOP THEM! KEEP CANCER ALIVE!)
4. ballet (because seriously: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.)

The Kochs basically give a TON of money (millions of dollars) to the CATO Institute. Scott Walker, $40K? HAH! These CATO people are the REAL problem. They want to end the War on Drugs. Insane, right? We know that the War on Drugs keeps us SAFE from Mexicans and keeps all that violence on their side of the fence. More than 30,000 Mexicans killed as of December! Thank God Mexican lives don’t count as human lives. Our government is doing a good, no, a great job protecting us and seriously, who cares about brown people or should I say non-people? HAHAHA! Public unions are good, government is good, and government protects us from drugs and brown people. The Kochs want to end all that. Look, as far back as 1989 CATO has been trying to decriminalize drugs. Don’t worry, nobody listens to them because they are INSANE.

CATO also rejects the Patriot Act. How can you hate the Patriot Act? Are you not American? They made it easy for you to understand by putting the word “Patriot” in the legislation. That means you should vote YES. Giving up our civil liberties is not a big deal. We need our government. Whether it’s Obama or Bush, we can all agree that the TSA is really good at what they do. God, those patdowns feel SOOOO good.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10599

The Kochs also support Reason Foundation. You don’t know about that? Let me tell you. Basically, REASON Foundation is a bunch of cop haters. Last month, they did a “news” (as if we wanna know!) story on three cops that beat up an unarmed black kid. In the aftermath, the cops were suspended, sat around doing nothing and got paid (like that’s a bad thing!). I don’t know about you, but that puts a smile on my face for four reasons:

1. I hate black people,
2. I love the police,
3. I love it when police beat up black people for no reason,
4. I love that it comes out of taxpayers’ money, because it’s not like it’s really my money.

The Kochs are trying to end this. The Kochs must be stopped.

CATO trying to cut defense spending:

Gay marriage. YUCK. That’s just obvious. If the KOCH Brothers have their way, there will be homos getting married left and right. Here’s another scary thought: gays raising children. …

If there’s one thing I know about billionaires, it’s that they only care about money. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros. They aren’t fooling me. Bill Gates isn’t fooling me with his vaccination campaign in Africa. He’s just trying to make African children live longer so they will buy more copies of Windows. Wow. Not even trying to hide it.

Now, I don’t know why the KOCH brothers want gay people to have the right to marry. Everybody knows marriage is for a man and a woman. Even Obama believes that. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve amirite? I haven’t figured out the angle, yet. Maybe it’s like this:

1. legalize drugs
2. legalize gay marriage
3. sell drugs, oil and Koch napkins to gays at their weddings
4. ????
5. PROFIT$

I don’t know exactly how it would work, but we can all agree that they’re evil. Think about it. CATO and REASON are the only institutions OPENLY advocating these positions. Who would do such a thing? Have they no shame? Minority opinions MUST BE SILENCED.

They live in Kansas and their corporation PAC donated a measly one-tenth of one per cent of the funding to Governor Walker’s campaign. So why are the Koch Brothers and their alleged responsibility for Wisconsin Governor Walker’s electoral victory and policies the big story that the whole Leftosphere is trumpeting?

John Hinderaker explains:

The most extraordinary story in the news these days is the all-out assault that the Left is mounting against Charles and David Koch and their company, Koch Enterprises. A day doesn’t go buy–hardly an hour goes by–without some new attack being launched against these two lonely libertarians.

Why? Simply because they are rich–their company is one of the best-run and most successful in the world–and conservative. The Left is trying to drive them out of politics and, more important, to deter any other people of means from daring to support conservative politicians or causes.

Understand, the Left has nothing against rich people participating in politics. Most rich people who are politically active are liberals, and the Democratic Party gets much more of its support from the wealthy than the GOP. George Soros is only the most famous of a battalion of sugar daddies who fund every left-wing cause. But the Left wants a monopoly. They want wealthy people to be barred from political participation unless they toe the liberal line. Hence their increasingly vicious attacks on the Koch brothers; they are trying to make an example of them.

Political contributions from billionaire hedge fund magnate George Soros, former Stride Rite chairman Arnold Hiatt, hedge fund financier Donald Sussman, electronics pioneer Bill Budinger, real estate developer Wayne Jordan, and wife of real estate mogul Suzanne Hess, Quark founder Tim Gill, insurance magnate Peter Lewis, heir to the Taco Bell fortune Rob McKay, television producer Marcia L. Carsey, corporate raider Robert Dyson, contributions from the film industry, trial lawyers, public employee unions, and big corporations are all ok when they are going to democrats. But one pair of wealthy conservative donors is an outrage and a threat to democracy.

Here, just for the record, is a link to the top 140 political donors, 1989-2010. I see a lot more jackasses than elephants on the list, and you have to go down to number 18 to find the first elephant.

As the democrat party’s November Appointment in Samarra draws near, the left has been furiously discussing how voter dissatisfaction and the Tea Party Movement is all the nefarious culmination of a diabolical plot presided over by scheming capitalists who artificially created the whole thing with their funding.

Andrew Ferguson, in this month’s Commentary, has a good deal of fun applying Richard Hofstadter’s paranoia meme to liberalism’s latest efforts at self gratification.

Over the past 30 years, Charles and David Koch, owners of a Kansas-based family business called Koch Industries, have given hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations that advance their political views. Those views can be described as unevenly conservative and generally libertarian (pro-gay marriage, anti-ObamaCare). The donations are readily observable in foundation tax records posted on the Internet, as all such transactions are, and the brothers themselves have made many public appearances on behalf of the think tanks and magazines they fund, given speeches and media interviews, issued statements of support, sat on boards—even, in David’s case, made a hopeless and expensive run for the vice presidency on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980.

Oddly, it took a while for the Inspector Clouseaus of the American left to smell a rat. And in fairness, it should be said that hiding in plain sight can often be the most sinister form of disguise for billionaires like the Kochs, the tricky bastards. About a year ago, the alarming rise of the Tea Parties inspired researchers at a website called ThinkProgress to start Googling. Among their discoveries, breathlessly reported, was the news that one of the Kochs’ foundations had funded Americans for Prosperity, a group instrumental in the Tea Party movement.

ThinkProgress presented its story as a scoop the mainstream press was afraid to touch. There the Kochs stood at last, exposed to broad daylight in the public square, where they’d been all along. ThinkProgress dubbed them “The Billionaires Behind the Hate.” We may never know what tipped off the sleuths to the Kochs’ political activities, but David Koch in particular must be kicking himself: I knew I shouldn’t have given that speech to 2,000 people in that hotel ballroom at the Americans for Prosperity convention! And the interviews I gave to New York magazine, and the Times—what a fool I was! …

One mark of the paranoid style in American politics, Richard Hofstadter wrote in his famous essay, is its concern with “factuality,” a piling up of random details to create a coherence that reality itself can’t provide. Journalism of a certain sort becomes a convenient instrument of the paranoid partisan. “The paranoid’s interpretation of history,” Hofstadter wrote, “is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will,” an “amoral superman” who “manufactures the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way.”

With the Kochs, the American left gets two amoral supermen in one. Mayer’s article, and the larger campaign it’s a part of, is meant not only to alarm its audience but to soothe it as well. Any Democrat unnerved by the rise of the Tea Party movement will find it comforting to learn that it’s a giant confidence trick. The belief requires both a deep cynicism about one’s fellow citizens and a touching credulity about the ease with which they can be manipulated. All those angry, badly dressed people shouting into megaphones on TV: they’re not evil, they’re just stupid.