Sunday, May 18, 2014

Koch Brothers mania didn't originate with Harry Reid or even a Democrat, but a Libertarian honcho with hurt feelings who fed them to a particular New Yorker writer. Hence, an August 2010 New Yorker profile against the Kochs and the Tea Party-Breitbart News, March 2012

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3/27/2012, "The Crane Chronicles, Part I: How and Why Ed Crane Pushed the Koch Brothers Conspiracy Theory," Breitbart News

"It has emerged that Crane had been a key source for Jane Mayer--one of the most rabidly anti-conservative journalists in America--in an August 2010 New Yorker profile that elevated the Koch brothers conspiracy theory from the fringe to the mainstream.

Having trashed the Kochs and the Tea Party, Crane then used that ostensibly independent, negative portrayal as ammunition in an effort to consolidate his power within Cato.
 
In the run up to the historic 2010 Republican sweep in the midterm congressional elections, many on the left and in the mainstream media attempted to derail the Tea Party-led victory. At the center of the left’s cross hairs were Charles and David Koch, heartland entrepreneurs who have donated significant time and resources to libertarian and conservative causes. In particular, the Kochs have donated in excess of $30 million to the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, which they helped create in 1977.   

In many ways, the culmination of the left-media attack on the Kochs was Mayer’s 9,966-word feature article in the August 30, 2010 issue of the New Yorker.  Mayer’s bona fides as an assassin for the left were well-established by that time; indeed, Mayer does not really even pretend to be a balanced journalist.  In 1995, she skyrocketed to left-wing darling status when she co-authored a book attacking Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas by attempting to prop up Anita Hill and her sensational charges....

Liberals quickly morphed Mayer’s New Yorker article into an electoral bludgeon designed to slow the Tea Party, smear Charles and David Koch, and make them social and political pariahs.  The article garnered 117,000 Facebook shares, 8,499 tweets on Twitter, and was dubbed by Media Matters as a “landmark exposé” that represented the most significant attack on the Tea Party in 2010 (though, at the ballot box at least, an ineffective one). The Weekly Standard'’s Matthew Continetti noted in a cover story entitled “The Paranoid Style In Liberal Politics: The Left’s Obsession With The Koch Brothers” that the Mayer article had been a left-wing sensation that “became a sort of Rosetta Stone for Koch addicts. It was the template for any liberal wanting someone to blame for all the trouble in the world. Mayer had unlocked the secrets of the Kochtopus.”...

Mayer’s article was, of course, more than an assault on the Kochs; it was a proxy attack on the the conservative and libertarian movements writ large, and the Tea Party in particular, which was falsely portrayed as a Koch-sponsored Astroturf movement.  It now appears that Mayer’s attack was also a false flag operation, in which the New Yorker attacked the Tea Party on behalf of an insider with an ax to grind--Ed Crane himself....

From the evidence now available, it would appear that Crane’s strategy had long been in the works. He had collaborated with Jane Mayer on her hyperbolic hit against Cato’s shareholders--the Kochs--in an apparent effort to create a media sensation and an internal crisis at Cato in order to wrest power from the Kochs and to consolidate his own control. Moreover--and as will be clear from subsequent articles--it appears that the increasingly public feud at Cato is being led by the personal agenda of a single man: Ed Crane.

Many in the libertarian movement are struck by the irony that one of its most respected leaders has become an exemplar of the libertarian warning that power corrupts.

At the very moment when the nation is yearning for strong, principled conservative leadership to combat Barack Obama, Crane has apparently chosen to end his career at Cato--and to endanger Cato itself--in a petty and self-serving game of brinkmanship."

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Ed Crane is out at Cato anyway:

6/25/2012, Cato reaches agreement on changes, one of which is that Ed Crane will depart in 6 months (Dec. 2012).




 

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