Advice to Democrats Running for Senate, Part 2: The Koch Brothers Gambit Is Bullshit (Except in Alaska)

Advice to Democrats Running for Senate, Part 2: The Koch Brothers Gambit Is Bullshit (Except in Alaska):
If you go to the websites for two Democrats-In-Trouble, Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina, right there on the homepage are headlines referencing the Brothers Koch. That would be little Davy and Charlie Koch, the conservative billionaires who are interested in opera, oil, and manipulation of the electorate through various PACs that create lie-filled or lie-adjacent ads against candidates, like Mary Landrieu or Kay Hagan. These scum-fucking pollution mongers can't explicitly advocate for a candidate because that's against the law. But they can say, "Mary Landrieu wants to work with the president to rape your children with Obamacare," and that's cool because freedom.

Landrieu's press release page is filled with responses to ads that come from Koch clubs, like Americans for Prosperity (which is about as empty a description as "Tweens for Ice Cream"), with constant references to "out-of-state billionaires" funding the ads. Hagan ties the Kochs to her opponent, Thom Tillis, and she has released statement after statement about the Kochs as an invasive species.

But let's pretend you're a North Carolina voter. You're looking up information on Hagan's website, and you see this headline: "David Koch Marries Ted Cruz With a Prenup by ALEC." Ultimately, it's a good introduction to the ways that Republicans are fucking over North Carolina through ludicrous tax policies and voter suppression laws. But that headline? That just sounds like crazy blog shit, like something the Rude Pundit would write (although it might read more like "Ted Cruz Blows David Koch on Their Honeymoon While ALEC Jacks Off in the Corner").

This has become one of the Democrats' chief strategies to try to keep the Senate. Harry Reid has amped up his attacks on the Kochs, calling them anti-American, anti-democracy, and just general dickfaces. It's all over the place in the campaigns. Mark Udall has "The Koch brothers can't buy Colorado." And he wants you to give him money to defeat the efforts of "anonymous special interest groups trying to buy this election."

Ultimately, this is a bullshit strategy because, frankly, most people don't give a happy monkey fuck about the Koch brothers. All an opposing candidate has to say is "Look, here's an outside group spending money on an ad against me," and the argument is over. What's the comeback? "My outside groups are good and yours are evil"? It's a waste of time, unless you want to spend precious ads explaining to people who the Kochs are and how they are motherfuckers, and doing it enough times to make a bunch of people beyond we idiots who wallow in Blogsylvania care. (Retort to that: "The Koch brothers aren't running for anything.") Now, if you want to make the case that all the outside groups should be forced by law to stay the hell out of campaigns, that Citizens United should be legislated out of existence, then you've got an issue. Otherwise, it just comes across as desperate.

Except for one race. In Alaska, Democrat Mark Begich has the ass-kickingest anti-Koch ad because it ain't just about lying outsiders. See, last month Koch Industries broke a five-year deal with Alaska and closed a refinery, partly because it had to deal with cleaning up a chemical spill, which Koch is trying to get out of. The Republican governor is suing Koch Industries to force them to clean up the site. It's so fucking embarrassing that AFP has pulled its attack ads against Begich from Alaska's airwaves.

See, Alaskans now give a shit about who the Kochs are. They aren't just another couple of rich pukes who wanna burn through millions of dollars on annoying ads. They are the rich pukes who poisoned the groundwater and took away jobs. That's visceral stuff right there, and Begich's ad takes full advantage of it. The lesson here for others, like Landrieu, Hagan, and Udall, is to find ways that the Kochs are sodomizing your states. They can be run out of town.

(By the way, Begich also is going after Citizens United, imploring voters to "Show Congress you want an end to Citizens United.")