In Politico's profile of Richard Fink the Koch brothers long time political strategist Richard Fink titled 'Charles Koch’s Brain' we get an glimpse into the bizarre doctrinaire view the brothers have of President Obama.
Charles Koch’s Brain
By Daniel Schulman
Obama frightened the Kochs. Charles considered him a “dedicated egalitarian” who had “internalized some Marxist models.” David, the more bombastic of the two, declared him “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation,” a leader steeped in the “hard-core economic socialist” politics of his Kenyan father.
The Obama administration, Fink told the brothers when they met that day in Wichita, was poised to push the country over the precipice. Labor unions, social programs, regulation, tax hikes—nearly everything the administration stood for, they stood against. The brothers had two choices, Fink said. They could keep their heads down and watch the country slide into oblivion, or they could come out swinging. Fink counseled jihad.
“If we are going to do this, we should do it right or not at all,” Fink told the brothers. “But if we don’t do it right, or if we don’t do it at all, we will be insignificant and we will just waste a lot of time, and I would rather play golf.” Fink warned the brothers that they would be placing not just their company but their legacies on the line. “If we do it right,” Fink cautioned, “then it is going to get very, very ugly.”
The Koch Brothers view the world was shaped through the lens of the John Birch Society as they were relentlessly indoctrinated by their Bircher father. In 1980 the Koch Brothers thought Ronald Reagan was far too liberal. Now they have used their foundations and front groups to propagate their bizarre views among the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party with visible success as we see how this far-fetched fantasy has become the dominant narrative on the Far Right.
Republicans, Fink still considers it odd that the brothers have become so closely associated with the GOP since their politics don’t neatly fit that label. “I view them as classical liberals,” Fink says, arguing that increasingly Democrats have pushed them into the Republican orbit. (The fusillade of Koch network-financed political ads targeting Democrats surely didn’t help their standing with the party.) He finds some irony in the fact that the vaunted Koch seminars, whose roster of wealthy attendees fueled the anti-Obama uprising via AFP and a web of allied groups, originally came into being in 2003 out of concern with the policies of the Bush administration. “Between the Fed policy and government spending and the aggressive foreign policy … they were putting America on a path of decline,” Fink says. “We are concerned, equally concerned, about the direction of the country from both parties and don’t have tremendous confidence in either party.”
Liberals? About as Liberal as Machiavelli was.
Fink is correct in that it has gotten very ugly. The megalomaniacal Koch brothers have tried to take the country in a very ugly direction. Toward a Plutocracy with some of the superficial trappings of a "democracy".