Opinion

Those evil Koch brothers

O the villainy!

We refer to David H. Koch. This awful businessman has given $100 million to help New York-Presbyterian Hospital build a state-of-the-art ambulatory care center.

Most New Yorkers likely regard such a donation as a tremendous act of charity. Not the New York State Nurses Association, SEIU Local 1199, the New York State NAACP or the Working Families Party. On Saturday, they protested outside both the hospital and David Koch’s apartment.

This is not David Koch’s first provocation. Since 2000, he has given away more than $629 million to more than three dozen New York City institutions ranging from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the American Ballet Theater to Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Columbia University. In short, many New Yorkers have had their lives enriched by David Koch’s munificence, and some may even have had their lives saved.

The protestors don’t care. Because the vituperation directed at the Koch brothers is a deliberate strategy for this year’s mid-term elections, not least to distract voters from the massive failure for which Democrats have no good answers: ObamaCare.

Thus we have Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid denouncing the brothers as “un-American.” Thus, too, we saw Bill de Blasio standing silently by only a few months ago when Harry Belefonte likened the Koch brothers to the Ku Klux Klan. Doubtless worse is to come.

Until now, we thought that what the Democrats and their allies loathed most was billionaire greed. Turns out what they hate even more is billionaire generosity.