Dave Weigel at Slate suggested that the Koch brothers should embrace their new notoriety and strut their anti-populist, anti-progressive, anti-environmental credentials proudly. What’s the point, Weigel seemed to think, of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on everything from climate-change denialism at the Smithsonian to astroturf “Tea Party” groups if you’re too shy to stand up and take pride in your achievements? Especially once all hope of obscuring your connections to everything from your daddy’s role in founding the John Birch Society to your own success in bankrolling every glibertarian outlet from the Cato Institute to Reason magazine to the teabagger-flavored Americans for Prosperity Foundation has been exposed for all the New-Yorker-reading world to examine?
Later that morning, Weigel posted on his blog, under the title “Kochs Keep Tossing Bricks at New Yorker Profile”:
Here’s more on the story I published this morning — a letter that the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation is sending around arguing that Jane Mayer’s New Yorker profile treated the Kochs unfairly.
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“The New Yorker article, and those pieces that have echoed it, rely heavily on innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions,” writes foundation president Richard Fink, who is the public face of the brothers’ ideological work. “Unnamed sources and those with a strong philosophical opposition to the Kochs – many of whom have no current or first-hand knowledge of Koch Industries, Koch Family Foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch – go unchallenged. Supporters of the Kochs are largely ignored (as evidenced by the fact that the reporter chose not to include the vast majority of supportive comments made by a number of people familiar with the Kochs and the organizations they support). On the other hand, those who reinforce the reporter’s preconceptions are given a free pass.”
This letter is a fine exemplar of the Squid-Cloud of Butt-Hurt, but there is a detail here no decent novelist would allow to pass unedited: Are the billionaire “Kochtopus” brothers really being defended (for money) by a man who calls himself… Rich Fink?
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Early Morning Open Thread: Squid-Cloud of Butt-HurtPost + Comments (69)