Persuasion

At Fire Megan McArdle, which isn't quite gone yet, is an awesome clip of Dylan Ratigan interviewing Mark Ames and Yasha Levine about the Koch brothers. It prominently features our favorite blogger, the Princess of Payola, the Duchess of Deregulation, the Countess of Koch-whores, Mrs. Megan McArdle.

Ratigan gives a lot of credit to Ames and Levine for breaking the Koch story over a year ago and Ames gives a lot of credit to McArdle for supporting the Koches. Ratigan says "the story was crushed, one way or another" and the attack was led by Megan McArdle, who personally vouched for David Koch. Ames said they were shocked that oligarchs were able to crush the story using McArdle and The Atlantic's reputation.

Levine says that the Koches are trying to move the Republican party as far right as possible and Ames says that they are free market when it's convenient and abandon principle when it isn't. Ratigan says they are subverting the free market. The whole thing is very entertaining damning.

In the end McArdle will still be paid to shill, which is the only important thing in her world. But there is no reason why we all can't agree that this is an adversarial relationship and that McArdle is paid to pacify the ambitious middle class, who is seeing their comfortable, safe world become a little less of both. So what if she is a propagandist? It's what her customers want--reassurance that their beliefs are real and their success inevitable.

Here's Mark Ames' run-down of how their story was squashed; it's very familiar to us after McArdle's Elizabeth Warren attack. There's something extremely distasteful and repellent about McArdle's support for shifting all power from the individual to corporations and all responsibility from corporations to the individual. She's not selling entertainment or consumer or financial products--she's selling fascism.

This is what a no-talent Leni Reiefenstahl would sound like if she had a blog.