And so it all comes down to the R billionaires, yet again, even if, in the case of the guy who beat Eric Cantor, it takes a little digging to find it. Which Charlie has done:
The most revelatory piece about how Dave Brat came to be the likely new congressman from the Seventh Congressional District of the Commonwealth of Virginia ... undermines the emerging character of Dave Brat, Ordinary Joe. A lot of the credit for his upset is going (rightly) to various radio hosts who took the payola from wingnut sugar daddies as described by Ken Vogel and MacKenzie Weinger. Mark Levin took almost $800,000 from Americans For Prosperity. Laura Ingraham was on the arm, too. Brat also seems to owe his job to Cato Institute president John Allison. [Blogger's note: Hannity took even more $$.]
The funding for the program came from John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T (a financial-services company) who now heads the Cato Institute. The two share an affinity for Ayn Rand: Allison is a major supporter of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Brat co-authored a paper titled "An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand." ...
In 2008, Allison was forced by the evil federal government to take some TARP bailout money. ... he got busy and set up the BB&T Moral Foundations Of Capitalism Program, which is how Brat's gig at Randolph-Macon came to be. In brief, Brat's job ... was financed in some way or another by the same vast lagoon of plutocratic payola with which we've all become sadly familiar. This is not going to be prominent in the mainstream analysis of what happened.The only people who don't seem to know that the Tea Party is about as grass-roots as a yacht factory are the teabaggers themselves. From its inception that group has been bought and paid for by a handful of very wealthy people, whose interests are in exact opposition to the well-meaning but purposefully misinformed average Dicks (and Janes) of the movement. So it'll be interesting to see what this guy does when he gets to D.C. Wittingly or un, it sure looks like he's beholden to and programmed to do the bidding of the same self-interested and cynical plutocrats currently running everyone else in the R party nowadays.
For those who can stand it, there's more detail here.
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