Koch, Obama, and Saddam Hussein

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Brad Friedman has obtained an audio recording of a seminar held by the 
Koch brothers
earlier this year near Vail, Colorado, and today we’ve got a piece about the seminar up on our site. Here’s how it starts:

“We have Saddam Hussein,” declared billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, apparently referring to President Barack Obama as he welcomed hundreds of wealthy guests to the latest of the secret fundraising and strategy seminars he and his brother host twice a year. The 2012 elections, he warned, will be “the mother of all wars.”

This has prompted a lot of people to insist that Koch compared Obama to Saddam Hussein. And maybe he did. But here’s the whole passage:

But we’ve been talking about — we have Saddam Hussein, this is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months. For the life or death of this country. So, I’m not going to do this to put any pressure on anyone here, mind you. This is not pressure. But if this makes your heart feel glad and you want to be more forthcoming, then so be it.

Can I offer an alternative explanation? Obviously Koch was a little muddled here and never finished his thought, so it’s hard to say exactly what he meant. But Saddam Hussein famously called the first Gulf War “the mother of all battles,” and it’s quite possible that Koch intended something like, “Saddam Hussein called the Gulf War the mother of all wars, and for us, this is the mother of all wars we’ve got in the next 18 months.”

I don’t know this for sure, any more than anyone else knows what that stray fragment meant. Koch obviously had some kind of quip in mind, but never managed to actually deliver it. But suggesting that he meant to compare Obama to Saddam Hussein is a stretch. At the very least, there’s at least one other quite plausible interpretation.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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