Bad news from Zach Galifianakis: What the Koch brothers are doing is "not freedom"

Good thing I already hate “The Hangover” or else this would have been bitterly disappointing.

The phrasing is important here, I think.

The comedian is referring to a scene in “The Campaign” in which Ferrell’s character, Congressman Cam Brady, takes a swing at Huggins and accidentally hits a baby.

“We really wanted to highlight the ridiculousness that politics has descended into,” Galifianakis says. “Whether you are on the right or the left, everyone can agree that there are a lot of outside influences in American politics that are not good for the system. There’s just too much money.”…

“I think it is pretty obvious that the Motch brothers represent the Koch brothers,” says Galifianakis, referring to the industrialists known for supporting conservative advocacy groups. “I disagree with everything they do. They are creepy and there is no way around that. It’s not freedom what they are doing.”

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“I disagree with everything they do.” Even for offhand conversation, that’s an unusually broad overstatement, particularly since the Kochs aren’t social-conservative warriors of the sort that bien-pensant liberals like this guy viscerally despise. Read Nick Gillespie’s post at Reason from last year noting some of the causes to which the Kochs have donated, on top of the millions they’ve contributed to “medical researchers, hospitals, and cultural institutions.” Galifianakis might hate their free-market philosophy but unless he’s a very unusual liberal when it comes to social causes, it’s not remotely true that he disagrees with “everything they do.” So why say it? For one of two reasons: (1) He hasn’t read anything about them that the left hasn’t fed to him, so he’s willfully ignorant of what they do and don’t support; (2) he knows they’re libertarian and agrees with some of their social positions but feels obliged, whether in solidarity with the left or as some sort of Pavlovian liberal response to the mention of their names, to reject them utterly anyway. In light of his “creepy,” ominous insistence that their advocacy for their causes isn’t freedom, I’m not sure which is worse. If you’re going to kick someone out of the Freedom Treehouse, you’d want to at least make sure you know what their views are first, right? Or does disagreement on any single important issue, like campaign finance, justify rhetorical expulsion no matter where they are on everything else?

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Speaking of Pavlovian liberal responses, via Reason, here’s a relevant recent clip from Aaron Sorkin’s latest embarrassing exercise in left-wing wish-fulfillment, “The Newsroom.” Exit quotation from the Kochs’ spokesman, responding to Galifianakis: “Last we checked, the movie is a comedy. Maybe more to the point is that it’s laughable to take political guidance or moral instruction from a guy who makes obscene gestures with a monkey on a bus in Bangkok.”

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