Comrades! The Koch Brothers conspiracy theory ought to be simple enough.

“They pay their conservative political puppets to hand over lucrative public energy contracts, and to erase regulations, so that they can become even richer.”

Simple, comrades! Not quite simple enough for the Tea Party rabble to understand, but simple enough for journalists of normal intelligence to reproduce as needed. That’s why it was invented to begin with.

Stay On Message, Comrades!

Yet some of us, comrades, are in need of urgent re-education.

Bloomberg Markets’s Asjylyn Loder and David Evans have just published a profile of the Koch Brothers that ruins the careful propaganda efforts of the past two-and-a-half years.

They try to cast the Koch Brothers as the masters of a nefarious global conspiracy, alleging crimes committed around the world–and in the process, make the Kochs out to be law-abiding corporate citizens!

Consider, for example, their star witness, one Ludmile Egorova-Farines, who they say is a whistleblower unjustly dismissed by the Kochs for uncovering foreign corruption. Not only did the French courts dismiss her lawsuit for wrongful termination, and order her to pay her own legal costs, but they affirmed that she had shown “serious deficiencies,” an “irrational attitude,” and a “lack of transparency.” A colossal blunder! (more…)

It’s quite a stretch to call The Nation’s Max Blumenthal a journalist.

A real journalist is free to have an opinion and even to express it, but he doesn’t fabricate things to make his subject look bad. A real journalist tries to understand his subject and help his audience understand it instead of just subjecting it to abject ridicule.

Blumenthal, who leaped to conclusions in his since-corrected Salon.com article to slander Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, is an ethically challenged agitprop creator and self-indulgent performance artist. His slurring of O’Keefe, who helped to expose the criminal inclinations of ACORN, as a racist is the same thing that ACORN does when it’s attacked. If you disagree, you’re a racist. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!

This left-wing extremist, who wrote the book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, is so consumed by his hatred of the other side that he can’t think straight. His work is littered with factual errors, non sequiturs, selective use of evidence, glittering generalities, and hyperbole.

Blumenthal hates the Christian right, evangelicals, supporters of Israel, tea party activists, conservatives, and Republicans. This is not an exhaustive list. To him, conservatives are a “movement that’s filled with people who can’t handle individual freedom and the pressures of democracy.” Conservatives also are needy losers seeking redemption, according to Blumenthal: (more…)