An ancient source of heat, if not much illumination. Dave Weigel reports on the latest attempts to polish the right-wing dung droppings:
Grover Norquist is not shy about media availibility, but yesterday was spectacularly busy. On Monday, Norquist had tweeted that he and his wife were “off to Burning Man” this year, after ages of wishing and hoping…
Honestly, had someone like Bill Bennett or Rick Santorum decided to check out Burning Man, the proverbial man would have bitten the proverbial dog. But Norquist, perennial bard of the “Leave Us Alone Coalition,” is a Burning Man natural. Modern libertarians have always overlapped with, and grown out of, the counterculture.
A more intriguing aspect of that is how wealthy businessmen, who come to politics less out of a desire to build desert sculptures and more to prevent regulation of their businesses. That’s the story suggested by Lee Fang, who covered the annual Las Vegas FreedomFest—a studiously cool conference that stands apart from the dry klatsches you see in D.C.—and ran into Don Blankenship. Yes, Don Blankenship, he of Massey Energy, he of many pro-coal rallies in West Virginia. “I’m basically looking for information and fresh ideas,” Blankenship told Fang, from the meeting, which he attended right after the Heartland Institute’s annual climate change skepticism conference. “We’re in a reg-cecession.” The hipness of libertarianism was a much more attractive storm port than the messy, villifiable activism he’d paid for before. This, it’s pretty clear, is a reason why Pando is publishing so many pieces about the unsung past of Reason and the (increasingly well-known) background of the Koch family and Rand Paul. There’s an effort to close off an escape hatch, before these people can rebrand themselves as relatable, radical, and cool.