I haven’t read Assrocket in a couple of years, and that was obviously a good decision. I think he’s either a hopeless idiot or he thinks his audience is hopelessly dumb. Today he discusses the left’s semi-coordinated efforts to raise awareness about the Koch Brothers and to make them pay a price for their political advocacy. But what reason does he give his readers for why the left is doing this?
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 not going after the Koch Brothers because they are rich and they are not going after them because their company is well-run. Hinderaker is simply wrong. And when you start out an analytic piece with a stupid inaccurate premise, you are not likely to recover.
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.
It’s really an astonishing sets of assertions. Most rich people who are politically active are obviously Republicans, as we know from personal experience. Meanwhile, politically active teachers, nurses, pipefitters, community organizers, and college students are overwhelmingly Democrats (or, in the Republican lexicon: “socialists”). The Republicans unanimously opposed raising taxes on the wealthiest two percent of earners which would have done more to balance the budget than all their attacks on public broadcasting and public unions and planned parenthood, and NASA. The Republicans were nearly unanimous in opposing the Wall Street reforms which imposed some consequences on the rich for destroying the economy. And the Republicans just used the debate over the Continuing Resolution to pass one anti-environmental amendment after another, which only benefits rich business owners who want to send pollution into our rivers and our atmosphere.
You can’t really understand anything about American politics if you don’t understand that the Republican Party is a party that represents business owners’ interests while the Democratic Party is more inclined to represent workers’ interests. The Democrats do an imperfect job in large part because representing people of modest means doesn’t bring in the same amount of money as representing rich people. The Dems have to rely on superior organization, and unions are a part of that. But the Dems can also be co-opted, as it lessens the financial disadvantage (see DLC).
I don’t think the parties should be totally binary. Democrats should not see business owners as antagonists and Republicans shouldn’t ignore the plight of working people. Especially the president, regardless of party, needs to bridge the differences between the parties a bit. But it’s still the basic structure of American politics: workers’ party vs. business’s party. If you don’t get that, you understand nothing.
The Koch Brothers are major polluters. Most people do not benefit from environmental degradation. The Koch Brothers do. The left opposes the Koch Brothers because their business activities make the world a worse place and their political activities are effective and lead to unhappy political outcomes for our country. It’s as simple as that.
Also, too, Citizen’s United means that the Koch Brothers, in the form of a corporation, can spend unlimited funds on elections, drowning out all our little donations and all our little voices. Only a combined, collective effort of little people has any chance of balancing that out. Assrocket should explains this stuff to his readers.
It’s interesting that the Kochs are getting a lot of attention, finally. Here’s what I know:
So, Charles is the smart one, and David is a genuine idiot. David is given what amounts to an allowance to buy companies and run them. Run them, generally as you may have anticipated, into the ground. My father’s company–the one he worked for, not owned–was bought by David Koch. Koch would show up occasionally, have meetings, choose a person to humiliate at the meeting, make a few uninformed decisions, and then leave.
My old man, who was extremely well-liked and respected in the industry (I’m very partisan but it’s true), as well as the problem solver in the company particularly for technical matters, never got humiliated in a meeting, but made the decision to retire a year or two early, because he felt that Koch was destroying the company. In particular, there was pressure to lower quality in order to diminish the cost of production. To this day, when Koch’s name comes up, he says, “that asshole!”
So, the point is that there is a reason to avoid systems that concentrate great wealth and power in individuals hands without any checks on that power. Sometimes, those individuals are actually quite stupid. David by all accounts I’ve heard, not just my father’s, really is.
You tell the truth, BooMan.
Hay, I thought it was the evil unions that were bankrolling Democrats. Now it’s rich folks? Buttrocket really needs to stay with the script. And this was blog of the year a while ago?!!
Do you know how the Koch’s got of the ground, so to speak? They became partners with Stalin in getting Russian gas/oil out of the ground. I wonder what Assrocket thinks of that.
Yes and most of their contracts to this day are govt
Do you have a source for that? If it’s true, we need investigations on the security aspects of contracting with extremists who openly want to drown the US Government in a bathtub. Whose side will they be on when a crisis comes?
Oh he’s on the script alright. The “George Soros (wink-wink) runs the Democrat Party” script.
The Democratic Party is periodically controlled by unions, by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers, by Communists, by blacks (who are also all Communists) and lately by Hispanics who want to take the Southwestern part of the country and give it to Mexico. The script rotates through various Bircher memes, most of which are contradictory, and you have to keep up.
Left-Right was the seating arrangement for the French legislature. Top-bottom is what politics are about.
Hindraker is not mistaken; he is lying. Every single one of these folks are propagandists, either motivated by ideology (“true believers”), pay (see Erickson), or the desire to get into the “wingnut welfare” (virtually every right-wing talk show host).
This is not where the political battle is. Their audience is miniscule. It is the ordinary people who are watching riveting events, like what’s going on in Wisconin, who are significant in this. And they get their information through personal networks, gossip, and the commercial media, and have idiosyncratic ways of deciding what information is credible.
That said, most of them would find the idea that money is not driving politics and that billionaires are not part of that to be not credible.
This is true, so far as it goes, but misses the point of partisan blogs.
Their purpose is not to reach mass audiences or convert the unconverted – any more than (with all respect) BT is. It’s to give background analysis and talking points to fellow travelers, who then, presumably, use them in their personal networks.
And in those circles, the “the Democrats are rich elitists, and we’re the salt of the earth working folks” meme has a long pedigree. It’s not only the emphasis on Soros, but the whole “Hollywood liberal” schtick. It’s classic Roveian strategy: attack your opponent’s strength (in this case, that Democrats are more likely to advocate for working class interests). And it also plays a big part in the “spoiled rich public union workers” narrative, too.
Sure, it’s up-is-down, war-is-peace demagoguery. But it also works, or they wouldn’t keep coming back to it. Asshat knows exactly what he is doing.
To be clear, I’m not comparing Asshat’s content to BT – only the way their respective readers use their blogs. Except that even when I don’t agree with him, Boo is, you know, genuinely thoughtful and informed.
There is a fundamental difference between rhetoric, even polemic—and propaganda. Hindraker engages in propaganda. BoomanTribune for the most part is a matter of rhetoric, only occasionally slipping into polemic.
There is no obvious motive to deceive. That is not true of the rightwing blogosphere. It’s all talking points, talking points, talking points.
This moron is well aware that the US Chamber of Commerce bought seats for the teabagger KochSuckers. So who does he think pay dues to the Chamber? It’s a sad day for America when fools and liars like this have any audience at all.