The Evil Koch Brothers seems to be a theme this week, picked up by David Blaska:

Our progressive acquaintances have developed an unhealthy obsession with the Koch Brothers. The Koch Boys serve as their all-purpose scapegoat and boogeyman, blamed for every political disappointment.

Used as an epithet, “Koch Brothers!” rallies the righteous like a blast of the vuvuzela in the Capitol rotunda — with as much nuance. The boys are buying elections with fiendishly clever appeals to something they call “reason.” The temerity of the two businessmen in joining America’s political debate incites progressives to choke off the pipeline of free political speech, lest a restive citizenry make the wrong choice and vote Republican.

The speech Nazis have decreed: No sifting and winnowing for you!

Last week, the citizens of Kenosha elected two reform candidates to their school board. The George Soros-funded Center for Media and Democracy (which now owns The Progressive magazine — no tentacles there!) griped that “David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity group helped defeat two public education advocates [i.e., teachers union favorites]. … Not since the age of the Robber Barons have we seen such an assault by the monied interests on the institutions of our democracy.” (Watchdog unravels CMD’s liberal funding.)

Robber barons! Well, if they can’t argue policy, they can always call names.

Demagogues need their demons. Rarely does an issue of The Capital Times, The New York Times, orThe Progressive forget to do story time on the Koch hobgoblins. Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid excoriated the Koch Brothers by name on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Reid “knows that bashing the Kochs is good for business for Democrats,” explains the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza.

One-percenter Mary Burke followed the script. “Tell the Koch Brothers: Stay Out of Wisconsin,” her campaign advertises. As the hippies used to say in the ’60s, “U.S. Out of North America!”

Too late, Mary. The Kochs are already in Wisconsin. With paper mills in Green Bay, Neenah, and Sheboygan employing thousands. With refining, chemicals, and biofuels operations in Junction City, Waupun, Madison, and Milwaukee employing hundreds more. With asphalt plants in Green Bay and Stevens Point giving jobs to still more.

The irony is that the Koch Brothers have signed more union contracts in Wisconsin than Our Ms. Burke. Is that your jobs plan? “Get out of Wisconsin!” You sound like Graeme Zielinski.

The Koch Brothers argue for a smaller role of government, a more enterprising economy. So do many of us here in Wisconsin. That’s proof to progressives that someone has too much speech. Now they’re crowing over the passage in the spring elections last week, in some communities, of a proposed constitutional amendment restricting political speech. (Advisory only, thank you.) Tell you what, let me word the next one: “Resolved: the Bill of Rights should be amended to deprive citizens organized as corporations from exercising their collective political speech, heretofore protected by the First Amendment.” …

This is what motivates socialist proselytizers like John Nichols. Enjoying his own First Amendment protections, the Bill of Rights should be gelded for others via a constitutional amendment. (Of course,The Capital Times Incorporated and The Nation, Inc., would retain their political speech.)

(The Nation: A Resounding Vote Against Koch Brothers Dollarocracy.)

A loyal reader agreed: “[Our] vote … is subject to being drowned by dozens to hundreds of low-information people brainwashed by mindless negative ads. If they didn’t work, the GOP wouldn’t run them.”

Get it? Progressives are only trying to save democracy by preventing “low-information voters” from receiving anything but the approved message. Y’know, us Neanderthals clinging to our guns and our religion. Perhaps a literacy test is in order.

Of course, liberals are all about diversity, except for intellectual diversity, in which they are as intolerant as Bull Connor.