It seems as if the Tea Party movement has energized the Right and that the Left seems lethargic. But what is the solution? The idea of Democratic candidates running against George W. Bush is a tactic of past campaigns.

The Dems need a bogeyman who can both revitalize liberals and frighten the daylights out of Independent voters. This someone should be able to make even old time patrician conservatives uncomfortable -- in much the way that the demagogic populist conservatism of George Wallace and Lester Maddox did in another era. Indeed, Tea Party conservatism is undoubtedly causing William Buckley, Jr. to spin in his grave.

There are two such bogeymen available. And although they are not GOP candidates, I am not sure that they need to be to serve the purpose.

The brothers Koch, Charles and David Koch have received some long overdue expose in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer -- as well as recent pieces by Joe Conason and Frank Rich. These have pulled aside the dark curtain that has obscured their activities and cast some disinfecting sunlight upon their nefarious political empire.

As Meyer noted in The New Yorker:

As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles's goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government "out at the root." The brothers' first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right.

Meyer also details the kind of America the Koch brothers envision for the rest of us:

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage "a very big tea party," because people were "sick to death" of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement "Anarcho-Totalitarianism."

To that end, the various Koch family foundations fund libertarian think tanks and advocacy groups. Among them are the Cato Institute (co-founded in 1977 by Charles Koch) and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution where Alveda King, a featured speaker at Glenn Lee Beck's August 28, 2010 "Restoring Honor rally" - also funded by the Koch brothers - is a Senior Fellow.

Alveda King is not their only effort to manipulate the faith of ordinary folks in order to advance their economic agenda. The brothers bankroll, via family foundations neoconservative and religoius right groups that seek to destroy the Social Gospel message of both Catholicism and the mainline Protestant denominations and transform them into apologists for buccaneer-style laissez-faire capitalism. These are groups such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center ("EPPC") and the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty .

EPPC members such as Eric Cohen and Rick Santorum have been vocal opponents of both embryonic stem cell research an LGBT rights. Such support underscores two important points: first, it creates a dilemma for working class voters who while being economically sympathetic with Democrats vote against their interests out of a sense of damnation anxiety; secondly, it takes to heart Catholic Right activist Robert P. George's recent claim the agendas of both economic and religious conservatives are one and the same.

Frank Rich reported in his August 29, 2010 column:

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs' detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there's a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly. Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska's anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a "slush fund"; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

This is laissez-faire economics at its worst and most cynical. The Koch brothers desire an economic system where capitalism is perverted, reduced to a vehicle for the powerful to enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary citizens instead of it being a vibrant engine that creates meritoriously earned wealth for the many. In short, they are the poster boys for arbitrary economic power. It is they, not a government of, by and for the people that needs to be feared.

Well, if the Tea Party movement and the fringe candidates it has spawned so rely on the Koch brothers, let's give the voters them in good healthy doses. Let the DNC make every GOP candidate from Linda McMahon to Sharron Angle to Joe Miller a running mate of the these two troubadours of laissez-faire. Let the rank and file Tea Party joiner know what the Koch brothers really think of them. As Joe Conason keenly noted:

It certainly seems unlikely that David Koch has ever encountered any of the folks who turn up at a typical tea party event or that he has ever showed up at a congressional town hall meeting to scream about health care reform. He lives on Park Avenue in a 9,000-square-foot duplex apartment and spends his time cultivating elitist Manhattan society with donations to New York cultural institutions, notably the ballet. He used to divide his time between a yacht in the south of France and a palatial home in the Hamptons, where he hosted "an East Coast version of Hugh Hefner's soirees" in the clothes-optional Playboy mansion. In short, Mr. Koch is not exactly a pitchfork populist and doesn't care much what they think. A former Koch adviser told The New Yorker that the Kochs back the tea party movement for the most cynical reasons. "This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves."

The Kochs are kooks, and have been willing to bankroll the likes of Dick Army's Americans for Properity to spread their brand of far right kookery via front groups we now call the Tea Party movement (Can you say, The Kook Brothers?). (Did you know that David Koch is the Chairman of this group?) Let the American people know that of they elect a Rand Paul, a Pat Toomey, and put in place a GOP-controlled Congress that they are essentially handing the reigns of power over to the Kochs and their Kooky brand of conservatism.

The shadowy, anti-democratic politics of the Koch brothers cannot stand the light of day.

Let's let the sun keep shining in their dark corners of American politics. It could make a decisive difference in November.

