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发帖数: 29846 | 1 David and Charles Koch have been the targets of a campaign of vituperation
and assault, choreographed from the very top.
By THEODORE B. OLSON
How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled
you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the
president's re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?
What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative
innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the
president's surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you,
sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that
, what if a leading member of the president's party in Congress demanded
your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could
be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you
have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?
Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an
attractive political punching bag by the president's re-election team. This
is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they
are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president's or
anyone else's office.
What Messrs. Koch do, in fact, is manage businesses that provide employment
to more than 50,000 people in North America in legitimate, productive
industries. They also give millions of dollars to medical researchers,
hospitals and cultural institutions. Their biggest offense, apparently, is
that they also contribute generously to nonprofit organizations that promote
personal liberty and free enterprise, and some of those organizations
oppose policies advocated by the president.
Richard Nixon maintained an"enemies list" that singled out private citizens
for investigation and abuse by agencies of government, including the
Internal Revenue Service. When that was revealed, the press and public were
outraged. That conduct will forever remain one of the indelible stains on
Nixon's presidency and legacy.
When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander
from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues
and died in disgrace."McCarthyism," defined by Webster's as the "use of
unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will
forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch's "Have
you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and
diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to
him.
In this country, we regard the use of official power to oppress or
intimidate private citizens as a despicable abuse of authority and entirely
alien to our system of a government of laws. The architects of our
Constitution meticulously erected a system of separated powers, and checks
and balances, precisely in order to inhibit the exercise of tyrannical power
by governmental officials.
Our Constitution even explicitly prohibits bills of attainder so that
Congress may not single out individual citizens or groups for disfavored
treatment or unequal application of the force of government. Prosecutorial
power is rigidly constrained and judicially supervised so that government
may not accuse private citizens of crimes or investigate them without good
cause.
Whoever may be the victim of such abuse of governmental authority, the press
and public almost invariably unify with indignation against it. If a
journalist, labor-union leader or community organizer on the left can be
targeted today, an academic or business person on the right can be the
target tomorrow. If we fail to stand up against oppression from one
direction, we abdicate the moral authority to challenge it when it comes
from another.
This is why it is exceedingly important for all Americans to respond with
outrage to what the president and his allies are doing to demonize and
stigmatize David and Charles Koch. They have been the targets of the
multiyear, carefully orchestrated campaign of vituperation and assault
described above—and much more. It has been choreographed from the very top.
When the president personally takes leadership, his political surrogates
and army of allies in the press and Congress quickly and surely follow the
direction and tone he sets.
The misuse of government power to damage or demean one's political enemies
is abhorrent and the very antithesis of a free society and a government of
laws, not men. It is time for the public to ask those engaged in these
practices, "Have you no sense of decency?"
Mr. Olson, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and a former solicitor general of
the United States, represents Koch Industries. |
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