The New York Times' Timothy Egan reminds us not to lose sight of the real enemy:
While the political press was obsessing over what Hillary Clinton had for lunch, the real action this month in the interminable run-up to the presidency was taking place at the knees of the Brothers Koch, David and Charles. Turns out, we may get an election after all, albeit one that will be decided by a pair of septuagenarians whose combined worth is more than the richest person on the planet.
We are in the “invisible primary,” an apt term for the age of oligarchs and dark money. It’s invisible, this suck-up campaign, because it’s happening behind the closed doors of a wealthy few, as a half-dozen or so Republicans audition to win the blessing of billionaires. It should be called the Plutocrat Primary.
The prospect of supposedly "independent" politicians, who presumably entered political life with at least a half-hearted pretense of serving the public, "auditioning" before a pair of oil-industry Billionaires whose blessing or rejection will determine their fate, is simply mind-boggling. Imagine Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower fawning and posing like dolled-up prostitutes in a brothel before these two brothers, frantically vetting every sentence in their position papers lest one of the Billionaires become displeased and move on to the next in line. The impossibility of imagining such an obscene spectacle is the best evidence of how far the Republican Party has fallen.
David Koch has now clarified the position of the electorate of two. It’s down to five candidates: Walker, Jeb Bush, and Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. The billionaire brothers will withhold their backing until one of the five says the most Koch-friendly things.
The Kochs, whose entire purpose in life is to make as much money for their industries as possible, have pledged 900 million dolllars to buy the next Presidential election. Their vehicle for this theft of Democracy is a thoroughly corrupt Republican Party:
The Kochs’ political views are like an invasive weed growing in every crack of the country, spreading through think tanks, corrupt academics and talk radio shills.
The Kochs' influence is constantly expanding. When Mike Pence, Republican Governor of Indiana made a fool of himself defending the state's discriminatory Religious Freedom Restoration Act, he immediately hired a new PR shill to mitigate the damage. His new deputy chief of communications and strategy? Matt Lloyd,
director of communications for Koch Industries. This week it was revealed that the Billionaire brothers have also dumped 125 million into expanding
faux "grassroots" (i.e., astro-turf) efforts into red states to further cement their agenda of "deregulation" (colloquially known as "pollution"), by dominating the electoral process in those states and effectively purchasing politicians who are eager to do their bidding.
But their real prize will be capturing the Presidency and turning loose a Scott Walker or similar puppet on the rest of the country, to destroy labor unions and roll back years of environmental protections. For that reason they've dedicated the balance of their money towards smearing the Democratic nomineee, presumably Hillary Clinton. But that all comes later.
[W]ith this bigfoot move into the Republican primary field, the Kochs are determined to pick a winner from the throne room of their family monarchy — free market and free election be damned.
While Walker is their favorite, his appeal outside of Wisconsin is questionable. So the Kochs have now opened up the audition process to the rest of the Republican field. It will only be a matter of time before John Ellis Bush is slavishly prostrating himself to the Kochs' interests, assuming he hasn't already done so in private.
Egan ends with a note of disgust, but also a semblance of hope that Americans will wake up and realize that their country is being stolen from them by people whose interests are not their own:
At some point, you would think that average Americans would be appalled by a few rich guys trying to buy the next presidential election. And — hope alert! — you did see a great pushback against the Kochs in red-state Montana this month. There, Koch-funded surrogates tried to keep poor people from getting health care, through the Medicaid expansion option of Obamacare. Koch agents were booed at one hearing. And they were shamed at another, for the stark cruelty of two people worth a combined $80 billion dollars trying to deny a basic human decency to people who earn $11,000 a year. Health care is on the way in Montana.