Jerry Moran just helping a fellow Kansan get the word out.
The Senate chambers were nearly empty Thursday when Republican Sen. Jerry Moran popped up behind the podium to do a favor for a beleaguered fellow Kansan, Charles Koch.
In Sen. Moran's apparent view, poor Mr. Koch—the petrochemical billionaire who has pumped hundreds of millions into projects denying climate-change, undermined federal regulations and nudged legislators into passing a plethora of laws helpful to the corporatist agenda in dozens of states—doesn't have a big enough forum to present his views.
So, the senator, whose top campaign contributor just happens to be Koch Industries, decided to give Charlie a boost by reading aloud the man's Wednesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. If only constituents could get as fast of action on fixing their potholes.
Meshing faux-patriotic treacle, propaganda and self-pitying whines is not a new thing. The Journal's editorial and op-ed pages, not to mention other much-visited venues, have been doing that for ages. Thus, Koch's bellyaching about "character assassination" and complaints that people have criticized him and his blood brother as well as other members of the plutocratic brotherhood wasn't exactly confined to media backwaters. The guy has one of the biggest megaphones on the planet.
But not big enough for Sen. Moran.
Most senators, even the dumbest blowhards, choose to insert such BS into the Congressional Record without forcing their audience, small as it might be on any particular day, to actually listen. Moran's real audience, of course, wasn't whatever handful of Kansans or senators might have been tuned in. But is Moran's Thursday kowtow an omen that future salutes to hoi oligoi will be equally pathetic? Can't he and the rest of our purchased politicians not smear our noses in it?