Mr. Charles Koch Is Sick Of "Collectivists" Calling him and his Baby Brother Un-American.
I know this, because he told me. Us. I like to imagine that brother nodding as he typed.
I can only hope that the WSJ editor who took his call had a change of clear underwear.
The Koch Brothers have been criticized and very harshly. They are clearly not amused.
Charles Koch would like the world to see him and his brother as the victims of bullying.
Senator Harry Reid is the bad guy. The poor? The sick? The little guy? They are villains.
Write this all down, America, Charles Koch commands.
All of it. Every word that I say.
"Evil Collectivists have smeared the Kochs, truly our Greatest Americans."
Write that down. 100, no, 500 times. Neat and legible. Then sign it.
My brother and I shall consider that your group confession and your collective apology.
Then this... this great... unpleasantness can all pass.
Thank you, America. That will be all. You and your friends can all go when you're done.
Remember that you all must use the servant's exits only when you all finish and leave.
When you're a Koch, the Wall Street Journal Op/Ed Page is "The Twitter".
When you're a Koch, Fox News is what you get to use for "The Facebook".
Now, attack Harry Reid then stare at our navels while they buy the outcome of 2014?
Ahem.
I think not.
DEAR CHARLES AND DAVID KOCH
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution does not guarantee you the right to be anonymous RW sugar daddies or the right to be free from criticism and rebuke. Calling you and your brother out isn't bullying. It isn't "Collectivist" oppression in any way. It's not abuse. Quoting you is not smearing you no matter what the pantheon of Fox Newsers might say while they are all nodding in adoration at you.
It's like this, fellas. We've all had enough of the platinum-plated poutrage.
The Supreme Court may have stupidly handed you the gift of being able to freely spend hundreds of millions of the billions that you and your kin both inherited or had handed to you on your intellectually dishonest smear campaigns and your enriching rightwing scams. That's true. The same Supreme Court may also have just stupidly boosted, again, the power of big big money in manipulating the outcomes of elections in American politics. That's true as well. But.
But you are still not our lords and masters. Stuff your little bell.
You? You and your friends, your peers, your relatives?
Harry Reid gets to call you un-American. U-N-A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N.
Having your 'spend a hundred million a cycle' cake and then eating 'Charles who?' too?
No Longer.
Harry Reid stood up to you. He called you out by name. As he should.
As the entire Democratic Party should.
If you get to claim the right to spend hundreds of millions of dollars per election cycle as a Constitutional right simply because you are richer than everyone else?
Everyone else has a right to know that you are doing it. Every time.
If you want to claim that money is speech, and that whoever has the most money should have the most speech, then your face should be married to your words and your actions.
America has a right to know that what you do is a big part of why national, state, and local governments cannot function and America's regular folks cannot have nice things.
America is falling into painful and damaging dysfunction and paralysis as a direct result of Movement Conservatism. Because of its policies and politicians, yes, but also because of its rich unaccountable playboy dilettante masters. Not because of liberals. Not because of liberalism. Not because of the hungry. Not because of the elderly or the working poor. Not because of minorities who don't vote for Republicans. But Because of people like you.
Because of your ideological greed cult, it's useful idiots and bamboozled foot soldiers on the front lines of voting against their best interests because they have all been conned. The actions and acts that are hurting this great nation are the ones taken by the most at the expense of those who have the least. An agenda systematically destroying our nation's great economic engine. It's once-thriving and robustly expanding middle class.
Enough.
You are no victims.
You are underwriting the ideology that is bleeding America and you want it kept quiet.
Nobody with tens of billions of dollars should be able to pull off being a ninja or a victim.
Least of all not a victim being oppressed by those who have the least.
Good for Harry Reid.
Harry Reid called you out.
How dare he?!?!
Simple.
We are not servants in your summer estate. We are not servants in your winter estate. We are simply the massive majority of struggling and hurting Americans who were not lucky enough to be born to wealth, just lucky enough to be born in the United States.
We know the score. If you aren't the only ones winning, then, somehow you are losing.
The bigger problem is, apparently, we don't know our place. Be it Harry Reid or us.
That nags at you. Digs beneath your skin. Eats at you until you have to do something.
And what did you do?
Why, you started screaming and stomping your feet, and I am sure your baby brother joined you in your tantrum like a twinned set of raisinesque toddlers in tiaras. Did you damage the sculpted topiary animals in the rear garden? Break a piece of MeeMaw Koch's prized set of china tea cups or saucers while you raged? No wonder you have to try and cripple America's democracy for your fun and profit well behind the scenes cloaked in luxury inside your richly appointed darkest backrooms.
If Harry Reid casting shade is enough to make you pitch a fit?
Well, gosh. Ain't that a trip.
I bet you both made the butler fight your childhood battles at Muckymuck Day.
"My butler. Your butler. The sculpted maze behind the riding academy. 3 pm. Be there."
I bet they got fired if they got marked up. Fitzsimmons has a black eye. Jeeves has nary a scratch nor a hair out of place. Good show, Jeeves. That will show those Pfizer heirs or that Johnson and Johnson kid whose schoolyard it is.
You got called out, and the audacity of that act was more than you could bear.
The most powerful man in the US Senate, like the occupant of the White House.
Failing to know their place. Standing up for themselves and saying it out loud.
That's the biggest sin of all.
A thousand Op/Eds of blithering self-serving bullshit and self-pitying blather that appears immediately after a phone call to some hapless minion at the WSJ won't change that, nor that Harry Reid is right about you both.
"There have been times in my life I've been a little afraid," Reid said Tuesday on the Senate floor.
"But I'm not afraid of them."
The reaction to this is a Tell. They fear being made the face of their own folly.
Harry Reid was right. Will he double down? Will we? What do we have to be scared of?
Negative ads? Smear campaigns? Lies? Village coverage slanted towards the Right?
Oh, noes. Not that. We have never experienced that before. Go on, Harry. Go on.
After all, as a better man than me once said: "The ONLY thing we have to fear is...fear itself."