While the West Watches Crimea, Putin Cleans House in Moscow

By Julia Ioffe

While the world awaits Sunday’s referendum in Crimea and nervously watches the Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s eastern border, the world is missing that, in Moscow, Vladimir Putin is busily cleaning house. 

Yesterday, Russian journalist Leonid Ragozin wrote here about Putin’s renewed crackdown on the media: What began just days before the Olympics with a Kremlin attack on Dozhd, the last independent television station in Russia, has now extended to Lenta.ru, arguably the best news site in Russia. On Wednesday, the site’s editor-in-chief was fired and replaced with a Kremlin loyalist, and the whole staff quit in protest. Yesterday, the Kremlin went full-China on the Internet, the holy of holies of the Russian opposition. Using some flimsy legal pretexts, it banned access to various oppositional news sites, to the website of Moscow’s biggest radio station, and to the blog of Alexey Navalny, who is currently under house arrest. Last week, the owner of Dozhd announced that, due to the clampdown, the channel is going to close in a couple months. 

Within the span of a couple months, the Kremlin, by hook and by crook, has cleared all the media underbrush. There’s suddenly not much left of the independent media, even of what little of it there was left after Putin’s first two terms at the wheel.

But that’s not all. In fact, terrifyingly, it’s not nearly all. Yesterday, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the pseudo-nationalist pseudo-parliamentarian, proposed banning the letter Ы (usually transliterated as “y” into English, as in NavalnY or, say, blinY) from the Russian alphabet because it was too “Asiatic.” The day before that, Vladimir Yakunin, head of Russian Railways, the biggest company in the country, proposed spending “trillions of rubles” on a “Trans-Eurasian Development Belt” that would take certain non-Western, non-Anglo-Saxon values into account. Yakunin added that the West had foisted onto Russia a form of economics—in which, judging by the number of Russian billionaires, it’s been quite successful—that was all growth for the sake of growth, and which annihilated Russia’s intrinsic spirituality. (It’s also a strange statement for a man whose children live in the very heart of the Anglo-Saxon West: London.) And that’s all happening with the backdrop of thousands of mysterious men, armed with state-of-the-art weaponry and dressed in uniforms that look very Russian but that Putin insisted they had “bought in a store.” 

Westerners rightly know Russia as a font of absurdity, but lately, it’s been hard to keep up: I’ve been trying to write this post for a solid week now, and have been constantly derailed by the increasingly bizarre and worrying developments coming from the Trans-Eurasian Development Belt. 

Actually, I wanted to start last week, the day a professor at Moscow’s elite diplomatic academy was fired for writing an article that slammed the occupation of Crimea, and comparing it to Germany of the 1930s. Or did I want to start with the zealously Bolshevik response of Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor-in-chief, to the foolish on-air, anti-war rant of Abby Martin? “The American propaganda machine, which Abby herself denounces every time she is on the air," Simonyan wrote, "is so strong that it is capable of brainwashing even the brightest and most ardent people. The more fiercely we will continue to resist it.” 

But then came the day a Moscow acquaintance announced on Facebook that her daughter, a first-grader, came home from school in a panic because the teacher had told the class that America was about to invade Russia. But then television host and attack dog Dmitry Kiselev went after the “radicals” in Kiev in a special broadcast dedicated to Ukraine, saying that the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954 was “a historical crime” and blaming the dissolution of Yugoslavia on the West. “What is Yugoslavia now? A pimple on the body of Europe.” (He’s the same man who on his show recently ran a photo of liberal magazine editor Evgenia Albats, who is Jewish, with the backwards Hebrew lettering asking: “What kind of a Jew are you?”) 

I was going to write about that, but then came the letters. First, an open letter to Putin from the Russian Writers’ Union, which is as Soviet as it sounds, declared that, “in these worrying times, when the fate not only of Russia and Ukraine, but of all European civilization, is being decided, we want to express our support of your firm and responsible position.” They also blamed “the destructive forces of the West.” 

No sooner had I looped that into my narrative, that another letter in support of Putin’s Crimea strategy emerged, this one signed by hundreds of the country’s artistic and intellectual elite, many of them dependent on the Kremlin for grants to their theaters and opera houses. Not that they had never signed such brassily Soviet letters before, but still, the sheer density of the zestily stale statist language was a little much. 

And, while we were reading about the Washington visit of acting Ukrainian prime minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, one state-friendly tabloid in Moscow—Moskovsky Komsomolets, whose revolutionary name has not changed since its founding in 1919—was reporting that Yatsenyuk had smuggled out Ukraine’s gold reserves to hand over to the Americans. Not to be outdone, Putin, who has denied the legitimacy of the provisional government in Kiev, went even further while Yatsenyuk was in D.C.: Ukraine, he said, had left the Soviet fold in 1991 illegally. 

That was Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry went apeshit on hearing that the House passed some kind of version of sanctions against the Russians. On its Facebook page, the Ministry posted a screed reminding the U.S. of the Declaration of Independence, the core principles of which, it felt, should apply to the residents of the Crimea, but not, for some reason, those of Chechnya, against whom Putin fought the war that cemented his hold on power. 

Yesterday, Ekho Moskvy, the biggest Moscow radio station who had its website blocked yesterday, invited on the air the editor of Den, a strange Moscow paper, said the crackdown on the press was necessary because the West had waged “an information war” against Russia, to which Russia had to present a united front. A family friend wrote from Moscow in shock: His television was telling him the internet is for radicals and perverts, which, to him, was a clear foreshadowing of a great firewall with the West. (Other Moscow friends, all liberals, are beginning to get seriously depressed. One describes a foreboding feeling that a civil war is near, another asked for the number of a good immigration lawyer in the U.S.I could go on, but that’s all the appetite I have for this grotesquery. Some of it is proudly Soviet, some of it is so outrageous and loony and crypto-fascist that it makes me wish for the hardy good sense of Leonid Brezhnev. These days, I’m afraid to look at the news and my almost entirely Russian Facebook feed in the morning. Who knows what the loosed hounds have done while I was sleeping? And, more importantly, who can stomach it?

My cup completely overfloweth. 

Here’s what’s scary about this: this is all being done, according to various reports, without any consultation with anyone outside Putin’s shrinking inner circle of old KGB spooks. The economic elites most likely to suffer from a plummeting ruble and sanctions have been shut out of the decision-making process. This is all about intangibles, the things that reason can't hook, the things impervious to logic and reasoning and even the cynical algebra of geopolitical interests. This is about pride and values and the Trans-Eurasian Development Belt. 

And, yes, all of this is familiar and increasingly terrifying, but to whom? To you and me and an increasingly besieged island of Moscow liberals? Because, terrifyingly, familiarly, all of this works. The method has been tried many times, and it is true: Putin’s approval ratings have grown to their highest level in three years. Nearly two-thirds of Russians think there is no legitimate government in Kiev and that there is anarchy on the streets of Ukraine. Over half said that moving Russian troops into Crimea was legal; of those, two-thirds agree that this is basically Russian land. Nearly half of those polled said that a Russian presence in the area brings stability, and that Crimea should be brought into the fold of the Russian Federation. 

What Moscow liberals are discovering is how quickly the ground has shifted beneath their feet since Putin came back to power in 2012, how futile and pathetic their resistance, and how easily wartime mobilization can steamroll them into nonexistence, in a way it couldn’t when Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008. This time, even their tiny Internet ghetto isn’t safe anymore. And its not clear that, once all this over and Crimea is safely part of Russia, that the regime will roll back these measures. In fact, it's highly likely that it won't. Maybe the Soviet rhetoric will dissipate, but the Internet ghetto will still stand pillaged and smoldering. And, most terrifying of all, why resist at all? Moscow liberals have looked on with envy at what their Kievan brothers accomplished on the Maidan, but their protest had a different end: All of this is happening in Moscow precisely because they went out to the streets to protest Putin two years ago. Dare they protest again, and lose even more? Or have they lost it all already?

Related Reading:

Putin Adviser Publishes Plan for Domination of Europe

 

Some Straight Talk for Putin

New Putin-Backed Prime Minister In Crimea Used To Be A Gangster Named 'Goblin' 

Open Letter From Ukrainian Jewish Community To Putin: Stop Lying And Get Out Of The Ukraine

Putin, Obama & the Green Axis of Evil

Is Vladi­mir Putin truly a modern-day Hitler?

Why We Should Care About Crimea

The Russians And The Ukraine: A History Of Atrocities

Why Poland Cares So Much About Ukraine

How to Justify Russian Aggression

Putin Cooks Up Obama’s Chicken Kiev Moment

In Ukraine, Obama’s Watching the Verdict of 1989 Dissolve

President Obama’s Foreign Policy Is Based On Fantasy

Putin’s Nationalist Strategy

Ukraine,Venezuela and the Lessons of History & U.S. Power

Obama’s Fantasy-Based Foreign Policy

Russia Blows Past Obama’s “Off Ramp”

Whatever Did We Do To Deserve This?

The 25 Most Ridiculous Photos From The Homes Of Ukrainian Government Officials (Photo Essay)

'Toons of the Day: S.O.T.U.? S.N.A.F.U.

http://tinyurl.com/mtjyd26

No, We Don't 'Owe' Russia More Я-S-P-E-C-T And An Apology For The 'Humiliating' Implosion Of Communism

Contrary to what some believe, we did not "humiliate" Russia after Communism. In fact, America did quite the opposite.

By Cathy Young 

As Russia’s bizarre non-invasion invasion of Ukraine continues to rattle the world, a familiar theme has emerged in some of the commentary: that Western powers, especially the United States, bear at least partial blame for inciting Russian bellicosity by kicking their Cold War foe when it was down. New York University Slavic scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a frequent Russia expert on TV, makes this claim in the left-wing magazine, The Nation; across the Atlantic, he is seconded by conservative Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens. Even some pundits with little sympathy for the Kremlin’s actions, such as the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, claim that reckless U.S. policies, above all NATO’s eastward expansion, helped generate the current crisis. 

Did we create a monster by humiliating Russia after the collapse of Communism? Is the answer — as advised by foreign policy “realists,” including anti-interventionist conservatives such as Sen. Rand Paul -  to avoid antagonizing the Russian state, treat it with more respect, and recognize its “sphere of influence” in nearby countries? A look at the facts suggests that whatever mistakes the West may have made in the post-Cold War years, Russia’s grievances are less about actual wrongs than about paranoid insecurities and outsized imperial ambitions — a mindset Vladimir Putin harbors himself, but also deftly exploits in the Russian public to shore up his power. And rewarding these attitudes with more “respect” can only take Russia further down a road dangerous to itself and the world.

After the demise of the Soviet empire in 1991, there certainly was a widespread view that the West had won the Cold War. But it was also generally presumed to be a victory over Communism, not Russians — who were widely seen as an oppressed people newly liberated from the totalitarian yoke. In the early 1990s, the United States eagerly embraced Russia’s fledgling democracy, its new status as a partner and ally symbolized by the cordial relationship between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin; Clinton’s first trip abroad as President, in April 1993, included a meeting with Yeltsin in Vancouver.

“Russia wasn’t even treated as an equal partner but as a favored child who was petted and given treats,” the late Elena Bonner, an icon of Soviet-era human rights activism and widow of the great physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, told me a few years ago, discussing an earlier round of laments about Russia’s wrongs at the hands of the West. (Then as now, the chorus of sympathy came in response to a Russian military adventure in a former Soviet republic trying to break away from its “sphere of influence” — Georgia.)

The “treats” were quite meaty: Western aid to Russia from 1992 to 1997 alone totaled $55 billion — not counting private charity and business investment. (In 1995, when the CIA submitted a report to the White House detailing Russian corruption that included aid money being pocketed by high-level officials, Vice President Al Gore reportedly rejected it and sent the document back with a crude epithet scrawled across the cover.) In a move that had more to do with political respect than economic reality, Russia was included in the annual forum for leaders of the world’s top economies — first in an informal “G7+1” arrangement, then, from 1998 onward, as a full member of the G8.

What about the alleged insult and injury of NATO expansion, which is also said to break a promise given to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990? The real story is far more complex. For one, Mark Kramer, director of Harvard’s Cold War Studies Project, make a fairly conclusive case in a 2009 article in The Wilson Quarterly that the non-expansion pledge is a myth (the 1990 negotiations concerned only the military status of the Eastern part of Germany after reunification). Ira L. Straus, founder and U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, has pointed out that when the admission of former Eastern bloc countries to NATO first came up for serious consideration in 1993, it was with a view to more extensive engagement with Russia — and its possible membership in the alliance down the road.

Due to lingering mistrust on both sides, Russia’s leadership often questioned the sincerity of NATO’s inclusive intentions when former Soviet satellites such as Poland were given priority in admission — while the West often interpreted Russia’s opposition to fast-track admission for those countries as blanket opposition to NATO expansion. In fact, both Yeltsin and Putin at different times voiced interest in NATO membership for Russia, and Straus is critical of the West for not being more receptive to these overtures. Nonetheless, his own accounts in a 1997 paper and a lengthy 2003 article leave little doubt that Russian attitudes — suspicion of the West, reluctance to commit to NATO’s strategic agenda, and resentment at being invited to join NATO’s membership plan on the same terms as other countries — were a big part of the problem.

Notably, Russia was included in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1994 and in the NATO-Russia Council in 2002; both provided a framework not only for military cooperation (and Western assistance to Russia in such areas as job training for decommissioned officers) but for a NATO obligation to consult Russia about possible threats to its security.

The prospect of Georgia and Ukraine membership in NATO is often said to stoke Russia’s fear of “encirclement” by hostile entities, provoking an understandably aggressive reaction. But fear of what, exactly? In October 2008, not long after the war in Georgia, retired Russian general Vladimir Dvorkin, formerly a top-level arms negotiator, published a fascinating column on the independent Russian website EJ.ru (“The Daily Journal”). Dvorkin pointed out the obvious: given Russia’s nuclear arsenal, a military attack on Russia by NATO forces is unthinkable no matter how many of its neighbors join NATO. The real danger to Russia, he warned, is “civilizational isolation” if it fails to modernize its economy and liberalize its political system and finds itself surrounded by neighbors integrated into the democratic capitalist West.

For Dvorkin, the solution to was to embrace modernization and freedom. Not so for Putin, who is keenly aware of the threat of such “encirclement” — and, crucially, of its effect at home. It is worth recalling that Moscow’s sharp anti-Western, anti-American turn in the mid-2000s came after the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, where peaceful demonstrations against rigged elections brought down authoritarian pro-Kremlin regimes. It wasn’t just the loss of allies that mattered but the power of example: today the Maidan, tomorrow Red Square.

Putin’s response was to blame these revolutions on American perfidy, with George Soros and George W. Bush implicated in the same conspiracy. In the lingo of the Russian political establishment, “orange” — the color worn by Ukraine’s pro-democracy protesters — acquired the meaning of “foreign-backed subversive” and became a standard epithet to smear the liberal opposition. In 2011-2012, it was widely used as a slur against Russia’s own protesters who turned out to denounce rampant election fraud and Putin’s cynical gambit to return to the presidency after using his obedient “heir” Dmitry Medvedev to get around the constitutional two-term limit.

In his third term, Putin has been more blatant than ever in his use of nationalist and anti-Western rhetoric to prop up an authoritarian kleptocracy. In doing so, he taps into a real sentiment among Russians — 78 percent of whom completely or mostly agree that Russia should reclaim its status as a “great empire.” Yet this sentiment is more nuanced than appears at first glance. The share of those who “completely” support empire restoration has dropped from 59 percent in 1999 to 40 percent in 2011. And, in a 2012 poll, Russians overwhelmingly preferred (by 78 to 22 percent) to see Russia as a country with a comfortable standard of living in which individual well-being is paramount than a great military power in which the prestige of the state comes first. Russians are not inherently anti-liberal or democracy-averse; but when the state controls virtually all of the mass media, it has a great deal of power to cultivate society’s most illiberal attitudes.

Behind those attitudes is the very real national humiliation many Russians felt after the collapse of Communism. But, as Bonner told me in 2008, it was hardly the West’s fault: “Russia humiliated itself. It spent 70-plus years building Communism, and reaped the results.” A wise leadership would help Russia come to terms with this reality. Instead, Putin has worked to channel popular discontent into resentment of the West while promoting pride in the Soviet-era past and using imperial dreams to salve the nation’s bruised ego.

Of course the United States should not seek out confrontation with Russia. But a respectful relationship should not include recognizing Russia’s “right” to bully its former colonies so that it can maintain a zone of friendly “buffer states.” Losing its buffer against democracy could be the best thing to happen to Russia as well as its neighbors. 

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She is also the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields, 1989).

Related Reading:

Putin Adviser Publishes Plan for Domination of Europe

New Putin-Backed Prime Minister In Crimea Used To Be A Gangster Named 'Goblin' 

Open Letter From Ukrainian Jewish Community To Putin: Stop Lying And Get Out Of The Ukraine

Putin, Obama & the Green Axis of Evil

Is Vladi­mir Putin truly a modern-day Hitler?

Why We Should Care About Crimea

The Russians And The Ukraine: A History Of Atrocities

Why Poland Cares So Much About Ukraine

How to Justify Russian Aggression

Putin Cooks Up Obama’s Chicken Kiev Moment

In Ukraine, Obama’s Watching the Verdict of 1989 Dissolve

President Obama’s Foreign Policy Is Based On Fantasy

Putin’s Nationalist Strategy

Ukraine,Venezuela and the Lessons of History & U.S. Power

Obama’s Fantasy-Based Foreign Policy

Russia Blows Past Obama’s “Off Ramp”

Whatever Did We Do To Deserve This?

The 25 Most Ridiculous Photos From The Homes Of Ukrainian Government Officials (Photo Essay)

Putin, Obama & the Green Axis of Evil

By James Delingpole 

One of the biggest divisions in the conservative movement right now is how to respond to Vladimir Putin's aggression in the Ukraine. On the one hand are the neo-cons who apparently want to flex America's muscles and open a new Cold War; on the other are the neo-isolationists who believe that this is a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. 

Both sides are missing the trick that could make this a win-win situation. (Well, for everyone except Putin, that is). 

What, despite Obama's best efforts, has been the single most transformative event in the U.S. economy in the last five years? Why, the shale revolution of course. Thanks to fracking and the exploitation of unconventional oil and gas, the U.S. is not only well on the way to energy self-sufficiency but consumers are paying less for their heating and lighting and US business is growing more internationally competitive.

None of this – it can't be stressed often enough, so let's say it again – has anything to do with the Obama administration, which remains ideologically opposed to fossil fuels and cheap energy generally (see Keystone XL; the war on coal; the ongoing subsidy of renewables; Solyndra; etc). It has happened because of two things liberal America hates - entrepreneurship and property rights (in the U.S., unlike in Europe, landowners stand to benefit financially from shale resources found under their land – so long as you're lucky enough to live somewhere like Pennsylvania or North Dakota, and not upstate New York where fracking is verboten). 

Now compare and contrast with Europe whose moribund economy has been crushed by some of the most stringent environmental legislation in the world. Last month, the CEOs of 137 major companies signed an open letter warning that European industry was being crippled by climate policies and rising energy prices – which are between two and three times higher than in the U.S.. Meanwhile, Jim Ratcliffe, majority owner of chemicals giant Ineos, has written to EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, warning that a "toxic cocktail" of high energy costs (inflated by green taxes, stratospheric feedstock prices, and uncompetitive labour) could drive Europe's $1 trillion-a-year chemicals industry out of business within ten years. 

All this has been observed with salivating pleasure by Europe's lupine neighbour, Vladimir Putin. The Russians have long been deeply sceptical of man-made global warming and in 2004 hosted a high-level international climate seminar in Moscow designed, essentially, to rub the climate alarmists' noses in it by forcing them to debate with notorious sceptics like Nils Axel Morner (who doesn't believe in extreme sea level rises) and Paul Reiter (who doesn't believe climate change causes more malaria). 

 Green on the Outside,

Red on the Inside.

The British delegate to the 2004 conference, Tony Blair's fervently warmist envoy Sir David King, was so furious he threw a hissy fit and stormed out of one of the sessions with his entire delegation. 

As Christopher Booker reports in his 'The Real Global Warming Disaster', this prompted Putin's chief economic adviser Alexander Illarionov to sneer: 

In our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government and the reputation of the title "Sir" has sustained heavy damage." 

Illarionov was even more damning on the global warming industry which he likened to the "man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the twentieth century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on." 

Despite all this, Putin went ahead and signed the Kyoto treaty not because he or his advisers remotely believed in it, but because Russia was bribed with extremely generous terms which enabled it to make billions of dollars a year selling "carbon credits". 

In other words, just like China, Russia has paid lip service to all the fashionable environmental shibboleths purely in order to exploit the weakness and stupidity of the credulous West. It is partly in this light that we should view Putin's adventures in Ukraine. 

As Christopher Helman argues in Forbes, Russia's energy industry desperately relies on Ukraine for two reasons. First, as a transit point for the six billion cubic feet of natural gas it pipes into mainland Europe each day; secondly as a valued (though somewhat held-to-ransom) customer. Ukraine receives its Russian gas from state-owned Gazprom at a hefty 33 percent discount. In return it is expected gratefully to buy it – at the risk of being cut off if it doesn't pay for it – rather than develop its own massive reserves of shale gas (more than 40 trillion cubic feet of the stuff, which could keep it going for decades). 

This is why Russia hates shale gas so. (As does Qatar). Like all petro-economies it relies on the price of the oil and gas it produces to be high and the availability to be scarce. What is happening as a result of the shale revolution is that countries which could once have been held to ransom by Russia's gas near monopoly (Poland, for example), now have it within their power to become more energy independent by exploiting their shale gas resources. 

You'd think, given that 14 percent of its gas supply comes from Russia, that the EU would be anxious to escape this dependency by fracking as quickly as it could. Instead, the environmental commissars of the EU have put every possible obstacle in the way of Europe's fracking industry and only recently abandoned plans to regulate it out of existence. Even now fracking is banned in France and Bulgaria, barely advancing in the UK, and being held up by red-tape in Poland. 

And the people Putin has to thank most for this are his (unwitting) friends in the green movement whose tireless campaigning against fossil fuels generally and fracking in particular has done so much to bolster his regime. 

As Peter Foster notes in the Financial Post: 

He realized that the environmental movement’s attempts to end the age of petroleum would impact only his Western rivals, first in their campaigns against private oil companies, and second in the disastrous impact of green policies in weakening Europe. 

Which brings us to that Green Axis of Evil in the title. If the U.S. were remotely serious about countering Putin's neo-Soviet expansionism by far its most sensible course would be to follow the example of Ronald Reagan. This doesn't mean a new military arms race (America can't afford it) but what would make sense is an outbreak of economic war, not unlike the one the Reagan administration began when it decided to stop subsidising the Soviet empire by allowing it to be sold cheap wheat. 

What the European economy needs more than anything right now is cheap energy. America can help out in two ways here: first, in the very short term, by exporting its excess (and relatively cheap) oil and gas; secondly, in the medium term, by lending its expertise to all those European companies which need help exploiting their shale gas as quickly as possible. This would weaken Putin's control over Eastern Europe far more cheaply and effectively than, say, missiles stationed in Poland. 

But of course it's not going to happen while there's a president like Obama in power. With its obsession with 'sustainability' and climate change, its subsidies for renewable energy and its rejection of fuels that actually work (like coal) the Obama administration is very much part of the problem not the solution. America, like most countries in Europe – including mine – sorely needs a leader with vision. That vision doesn't have to include a yearning for military invention, necessarily. Just a basic understanding that of all the world's great threats, probably the most all-encompassing, certainly the most insidious, is the one they call ManBearPig. 

Related: Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring ’97-Percent Consensus’ Claims

The Un-American Anti-Koch Campaign

But, it's the Koch Brothers who are Un-American and unpatriotic.

By Rich Lowry 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has high standards for American-ness. That’s why it carried such weight when Reid described the Koch brothers in a speech on the Senate floor as “about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine.” Coming from a typical Democratic politician lacking Reid’s powers of patriotic discernment, this would have been shameful hyperbole. From Reid, it was a peerless act of taxonomy. 

What immediately had him so exercised was anti-Obamacare ads funded by the Koch brothers, but surely other potentially un-American activities lurked in the back of his mind. David Koch gave $100 million to a theater in New York City so people can perform ballet and opera there. Has David Koch never thought to invest in cowboy poetry? No wonder Reid harbors the darkest suspicions about his true loyalties. 

Actually, of course, Harry Reid long ago established his comfort making any half-witted partisan attack. In his cracked version of forensic accounting, he said in 2012 that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes in 10 years — because he had heard it from some guy. 

If you want to score a contest between the Koch brothers and Harry Reid over who has contributed more to America, it doesn’t seem close. The Koch brothers got wealthy creating productive industries that employ tens of thousands of people. Harry Reid got (obviously much less) wealthy as a career politician. 

Any one of the Koch brothers’ many major philanthropic ventures — say, the $100 million to New York Presbyterian Hospital, or just the $35 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History — will do more good than Harry Reid’s constant maneuvers to try to protect his vulnerable incumbents. 

Reid’s maligning of the Koch brothers is part of a deliberate, party-wide effort to attack the politically engaged libertarian duo. Groups that the Kochs have donated to or are affiliated with have spent some $30 million on the midterm elections so far, with more on the way. For Democrats, that is a mortal sin. 

There is no consistent standard here. In 2004, Reid didn’t complain about a globe-trotting billionaire who made a mint through currency speculation spending more than $25 million trying to defeat President George W. Bush. By Reid’s standard, George Soros was as robustly American as John Wayne in the “Sands of Iwo Jima.” 

You can litigate the accuracy of the ads by Koch-supported groups, but as a genre, attack ads play fast and loose (although there’s no reason for anti-Obamacare ads to be anything but strictly accurate, since there’s so much material to work with). You can disagree with their politics, but they broadly represent about half of America. You can lament their spending, but welcome to our world. 

It used to be that political parties mattered much more. In their wisdom, campaign-finance reformers passed restrictions hamstringing them. This predictably elevated the importance of outside players. The Koch brothers are hugely influential, but the left doesn’t lack for people trying, in Reid’s stilted terms, “to buy America.” Green billionaire Tom Steyer has pledged to spend $100 million supporting Democrats this year.

The billionaire Koch brothers can agitate against cap and trade, and billionaire Steyer can agitate for it. That’s how a free political system works. In his speech during the Democratic global warming talkathon Monday, Reid attacked the other side’s billionaires (a.k.a. oil barons) during an event that was coordinated with his own side’s billionaire (Democratic senators had discussed the idea of the mock filibuster with Steyer at a fundraiser, of all places). 

The break-glass-in-emergency Democratic option in tough midterm elections is finding a boogeyman. In 2010, it was “secret foreign money” funneled through the Chamber of Commerce. This absurdly tendentious demagoguery didn’t stop Republicans from picking up more than 60 House seats. 

Nor will the attack on the Kochs affect this year’s outcome one way or another. Are we supposed to believe that the public, which is overwhelmingly sour on Obamacare, will ignore their own feelings about the highly consequential law and treat the midterms as a referendum on the people funding ads attacking the law they don’t like in the first place? 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has launched an anti-Koch campaign with the slogan, “The G.O.P. is addicted to Koch.” Most people will wonder, “Why are Republicans addicted to COACH? Or, KOTCH, the entertaining late mayor of New York?” For the line to work, Democrats would have to explain, “No, no. It’s COKE. Like the soda, and the drug. Get it?” 

The left can be forgiven for thinking everyone else is as obsessed with the Koch brothers as they are. The log on the Koch Industries website of the more than 200 New York Times stories mentioning the Kochs since 2011 runs about 20 pages when printed. The iconic motto of the paper could be updated to “All the News Fit to Print about the Shadowy Brothers Trashing America.” The logical endpoint of this anti-Kochery was the spectacle the other day of left-wingers protesting the coming advent of the David H. Koch Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital because of its association with a philanthropist with uncongenial politics. How long before demonstrators target the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center during a New York City Ballet performance of “Swan Lake,” and interrupt the dance of the little swans with cries of “Koch Kills Democracy”? 

It is inevitable that any conservative writing about this kind of campaign will quote the Saul Alinsky dictum from his book “Rules for Radicals”: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” In its piece on Reid’s anti-Koch gambit, The New York Times reports, “The majority leader was particularly struck by a presentation during a recent Senate Democratic retreat, which emphasized that one of the best ways to draw an effective contrast is to pick a villain, one of his aides said.” 

How high-minded. For a powerful national officeholder to stoop to such personal invective against private citizens seems bullying and itself vaguely un-American. But I defer to Harry Reid. He is the expert on American-ness.

SoRo: 

Two words, Dingy Harry: George Soros

He has caused the collapse of governments and is known as ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank of England.’

Your hypocrisy is showing.

The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs

George Soros: Godfather of the Left