This article [from last October] describes how the Left likes to see the Tea Party as having been birthed by the evil Charles Koch's efforts and how it now delights in how they see justice in a karma-like rebellion against its creator. I find this explanation a stretch since it was a grass-roots organization with no leader and I *was* one! I knew nothing of Charles Koch. But this article gives evidence of the Left's perspective that we're now in a migration away from the Tea Party AND with it, control by the evil Koch brothers. Well!!! Until the Lefties figure out a new way to 'tar and feather' conservatives, we're now being seen as the "Anti-Establishment movement". That's fine! We now have the public's ear without all that Tea Party crap-talk. I don't think the below "Cro-Magnum" label is going to cut it as a replacement for the derision of being a "TP candidate". TM
The Koch network gave rise to the rabid right. But now Charles Koch wails about a "lack of substance and civility"
I’m a big fan of irony, which is why I enjoyed this Wall Street Journal profile of Charles Koch so much. In an interview with Patrick O’Connor, Charles – evidently the more diplomatic half of the two most politically active Koch brothers – spoke somberly about the tone of the 2016 presidential race and of political discourse more generally. “It’s mainly about personalities and ‘your mother sucked rotten eggs,’” he lamented to O’Connor.
On the one hand, I understand Charles’s frustration. After all, he and his brother are looking to invest $750 million on this election. When a man, his brother, and 450 wealthy donors build a national network of umbrella organizations in order to dictate political outcomes via dark money, they expect to get the results they want.
Here’s the problem: The Koch brothers, whether they know it or not, got exactly what they paid for. If the tone of our politics has sunk to Cro-Magnon levels, it’s because the process has been flooded with money and propaganda and rabid right-wingers who’ve coarsened the discourse and made compromise impossible.
Everything about our politics took a dark turn around the time of Obama’s election in 2008, which is precisely when the Koch brothers’ political machine exploded into being.
snip
The Tea Party, from the very beginning, was designed for disruption, and it was a pet project of the Koch brothers (they actually created the first national website for the movement). Charles Koch says he’s interested only in advancing “free-market, small-government ideals,” but what he’s done is manufacture a faux-populist movement that has whipped the conservative base into an anti-government frenzy.
In the process of serving his narrow and self-interested ideological ends, he allowed the worst elements of the conservative movement – the xenophobes, the nationalists, and the theocrats – to hijack the Republican Party. Initially this worked, because it sent obstructionists to Congress whose only mission was to shut the government down. But, over time, it’s created a political climate in which it’s nearly impossible to govern. And it’s prepared the way for someone like Donald Trump (whose campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, is a product of Americans for Prosperity), who exists only because he’s been able to tap into the sentiments let loose by the Tea Party movement.
Hence the incredible irony of a Charles Koch bemoaning what’s become of our political process, a process he, as much as anyone, helped engineer.
******* "What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean?" Justice Antonin Scalia 1936-2016
Anti-Establishment? Cal Thomas referencing Bernie Sander's success as well as DT's, just called it,
"A bipartisan Hatred for anything Washington"
******* "What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean?" Justice Antonin Scalia 1936-2016