DownWithTyranny!: Jon Stewart asks, "Who are these lovable scamp Koch Brothers?" and answers his own question

"How bad can they [the Koch Brothers] be?" Jon asks. "I mean, if they were evil, would a baby agree to appear in one of their advertisements?"

"Now that we know the Koch Brothers are pouring an unending waterfall of money through a cleverly masked network of unaccountable organizations to peddle electoral influence, the ad sounds less inspiring."

-- Jon Stewart, in the above report, responding to
a Koch Industries ad placed on The Daily Show

"The poll . . . shows that the proxy candidates of billionaires are likely to win ninety-eight per cent of next Tuesday's races, with the remaining two per cent leaning billionaire."

-- from a recent "Borowitz Report," "Midterms Prediction:
Billionaires to Retain Control of Government"

by Ken

In case you haven't seen this Wednesday Daily Show clip, you must. The boys and girls at Moyers and Company posted it (now helpfully passed along by Nation of Change) with this introduction:

Regular viewers of The Daily Show may have noticed that Koch Industries has been running a series of treacly, feel-good commercials touting all the wonderful things the company does to make our lives better.

Jon Stewart certainly noticed. On Wednesday, he thanked the Koch brothers for their patronage as only he can — and even helped them out by recording a new, more honest voiceover for their ad.

At first viewing of the original ad, Jon is suspicious ("Wow, that's the kind of an ad that a company usually makes when it turns out a byproduct of their manufacturing process is giving young pubescent males talking nipples"), but he's moved nonetheless: "Two brothers working together, I like that. Unless it's, obviously, the Menendez brothers. [Nervously] These are not those kinds of brothers, am I right?"

However, after watching a brief Daily Show-produced report on the bros which begins, "The billionaire brothers are expected to spend some $290 million these midterms, mostly through their complicated web of dark-money organizations," Jon curbs his enthusiasm. "Wow, I can see why they'd want to portray their people as working in a smile factory, or as baby tailgaters." And he draws the conclusion I've put atop this post: ""Now that we know the Koch Brothers are pouring an unending waterfall of money through a cleverly masked network of unaccountable organizations to peddle electoral influence, the ad sounds less inspiring."

Which leads Jon to the somewhat different version of the ad produced by The Daily Show. If you haven't seen it yet, you'll love it. And if you have seen it, you'll still love it.

Meanwhile, for some reason I'm reminded that --

THIS RECENT "BOROWITZ REPORT" HAS BEEN ON MY MIND

October 28, 2014
MIDTERMS PREDICTION: BILLIOINAIRES TO RETAIN CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT

by Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—With just one week to go until the midterm elections, a new poll indicates that billionaires are likely to retain control of the United States government.

The poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, shows that the proxy candidates of billionaires are likely to win ninety-eight per cent of next Tuesday’s races, with the remaining two per cent leaning billionaire.

Although the poll indicates that some races are still “too close to call,” the fact that billionaires funded candidates on both sides puts the races safely in their column.

Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll for the University of Minnesota, said that next Tuesday should be “a big night for oligarchs” and that both houses of Congress can be expected to grovel at the feet of their money-gushing paymasters for at least the next two years.

Calling the billionaires’ upcoming electoral romp “historic,” Logsdon said, “We have not seen the super-rich maintain such a vise-like grip on the government since the days immediately preceding the French Revolution.”