With Friends Like These: Your Good Friend Kathleen Parker!

First, read this.

Now that you’re done, hopefully, you are somewhat saddened at just how bad things are going to get for our political system. It’s awful  enough our pundit class is out of touch, it’s quite another when they’re just out and out defending the poisoning of our government. The cherry on top, well and the sprinkles to, shaming someone for speaking the truth.

I’m not surprised that Shithead Hall of Fame® Inductee™ Kathleen Parker wrote this in the slightest. I imagine that she’s currently giddily standing by her mailbox waiting for a fat paycheck from the Koch brothers, or more like, their myriad of subsidiaries, fists clinched, with a shit eating grin on her face. She’s hoping attached the check is a letter of thanks, and that the envelope is perfumed with the scent of money.

I think my favorite part of the article is near the beginning when she name drops the Koch brothers and then adds: “Who? Exactly.” Now, I’m not saying the Koch brothers are a fully known quantity, but they are known. Maybe not known is that they’re pouring vast amounts of their wealth in to right-wing think tanks and political action committees, and have essentially wrestled away one house of congress from the American people. But they’re known.

Ms. Parker nuzzles up to her corporate masters with the tried and true “they’re job creators”: what with noting that they employ a mere 60,000 people. Truly, and they are using their wealth for good: “they are spending gobs of their own money to sway politics toward free-market principles and away from current government expansionist trends.” Yeah, we’re not even in to the body of her “article” and this is the table she is setting.

What I enjoy more is the notion that she thinks Harry Reid “broke protocol” by calling out the Koch brothers and then labeling them “un-American”. It’s hyperbolic, to be sure, but the bigger news should be that at least ONE democrat is finally punching back with nonsense of his own!

I mean seriously, for over a decade we’ve had to listen to GOP/right-wing stooges assert all kinds of insanity and accuse myriads of people of all manner of things. We don’t even bat an eye anymore at someone calling Obama a tyrannical ruler. That’s on both sides of the aisles in this beautiful thing we call the “false equivalency”. Which Ms. Parker uses with a cudgel like grace throughout her Koch brothers commercial.

But her assertion that Democrats are trying to make the Koch brothers the “face” of the Republican party is wrong. You can’t make something that’s so apparently true. And while the Koch brothers may never be the “face” of the GOP/right-wing they are now the driving force behind the party, the “id” for lack of a better word. More to the point they continue to be the dank, dark underbelly of the whole party.

The cudgel of false equivalency swings wildly when Ms. Parker notes that “liberal commentators” are frequently admonishing the Koch brothers. Funnily enough, the article on her website links to a Washington Post (well played Washington Post Opinion Columnist Ms. Parker) piece about Rachel Maddow going after the Koch brothers on a near nightly basis. So…just a singular liberal commentator then? She asserts that although they aren’t nearly as powerful as Rush Limbaugh, they still have large followings. Enough so that they’ve shone a bright light on those dastardly Koch brothers…which "no one has heard of"? The Kathleen Parker amounts of horseshit that this article is, is indeed confounding.

To call what Harry Reid said as “McCarthyesque” is laughable. If there was indeed any stakes in calling a monolith such as the Koch brothers “un-American” it would be one thing. You can’t blacklist and ruin someone who’s already won. With limits on campaign financing essentially rendered moot by the United States Supreme Court, elections are now ONLY for the highest bidder. Running for political office was financially untenable already. It seems that now running for office means you’ll have to get corporate sponsorship, not unlike another red state favored past time: NASCAR.

Ms. Parker’s flip-flopping in this article is dizzying as she tries to stick the landing on her commercial. She laments that indeed having the super-wealthy “influence” political outcomes, the bigger issue is name calling? That one senator calling out one monolith is somehow the slippery slope that will lead to “A Senate committee investigating such un-American activities as advocating free-market principles or pursuing capitalist endeavors?” is ridiculous. But Ms. Parker assumes that this already has. She is beyond stupid.

The cherry on top? She finishes her “article” with this: “Yes, it was bad when right-wingers called Obama un-American, but Obama is the most powerful man in the world and the rabble is just that. Reid owes the Kochs — and the American people — an apology.” No, no he doesn’t.  Obama isn’t going to be in power forever. The Koch brothers aren’t suddenly going to lose billions of dollars or influence any time soon. The foothold they currently have on the political system is just a start. With friends like these in the pundit class, for those like Kathleen Parker who asserts that she is “center-right” (like most of America), the American people ought to be really afraid for the future.