(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Some days, you read something and you think to yourself, you know, there's the Pacific Ocean right over there, I could start walking and keep going becausewhat in the name of god is the point any more?

The resources and the breadth of the organization make it singular in American politics: an operation conducted outside the campaign finance system, employing an array of groups aimed at stopping what its financiers view as government overreach. Members of the coalition target different constituencies but together have mounted attacks on the new health-care law, federal spending and environmental regulations. Key players in the Koch-backed network have already begun engaging in the 2014 midterm elections, hiring new staff members to expand operations and strafing House and Senate Democrats with hard-hitting ads over their support for the Affordable Care Act.

This is two guys -- TWO FREAKING GUYS! -- and they have more power within the American political system than a million earnest volunteers knocking on doors. They have more influence than millions of people writing letters to the editors, protesting outside school boards, or organizing online. This is two guys -- TWO FREAKING GUYS! -- whose politics were formed on what was still considered the Republican fringe in the 1950s and 1960s, and they have more power within the American political system than what's left of the entire infrastructure of organized labor.

Two freaking guys.

Amazing.

Two freaking unaccountable guys.

A labyrinth of tax-exempt groups and limited-liability companies helps mask the sources of the money, much of which went to voter mobilization and television ads attacking President Obama and congressional Democrats, according to tax filings and campaign finance reports. The coalition's revenue surpassed that of the Crossroads organizations, a super PAC and non­profit group co-founded by GOP strategist Karl Rove that together brought in $325 million in the last cycle.

Look at the facts. This is what Citizens United hath wrought. It has infested our politics with money-whipped italics. Two freaking guys. One election cycle. This is the power or organized money. It has bought virtual plutocracy in state governments from Wisconsin to North Carolina. It has bought itself the single worst Congress in the history of the Republic. And it is growing in strength, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, because Citizens United was decided in such a way as to choke off any regulatory solutions, and then Shelby County came along as the hook off the jab and what electoral remedies could not be buried under the floodtide of money could be washed away by the state legislatures in those virtual plutocracies. (Watch the states. That's where the real mischief happens, and that mischief makes the "loss" in the 2012 presidential race more than a little irrelevant.) At least in our last Gilded Age, enough of the ruling oligarchs hated each other as to leave something of a political opening for the Progressive movement to exploit. This time around, they've all learned. They work together, in secret, with the blessing of the Supreme Court of the United States, and they've managed to set this rigged game in cement.

And, of course, the real victims are the Kochs and their friends.

"We get death threats, threats to blow up our facilities, kill our people. We get Anonymous and other groups trying to crash our IT systems," he said, referring to the computer-hacking collective. "So long as we're in a society like that, where the president attacks us and we get threats from people in Congress, and this is pushed out and becomes part of the culture - that we are evil, so we need to be destroyed, or killed - then why force people to disclose?"

Honest to blog, I don't know where we go from here. (Kindly Doc Maddow has the same problem, and good on her for telling the Kochs to go whistle.) There aren't many avenues left by which ordinary citizens can effectively run their self-government any more, and the ones that still exist are narrowing by the day. I don't like to think about what happens to the politics of this country when it becomes generally acknowledged that there's no pea under any of the shells any more. The best thing that happens is that people simply give up and everything gets worse and more people give up. The worst thing that happens is that people look for other avenues through which to run a country and a government that no longer belongs to them, which is a bag of horrors. This is what Justice Anthony Kennedy helped bring about with a single sentence:

"We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

In a tragic sense, he was right. In a tragic sense, the system is not corrupt at all. The Koch brothers, and the forces that they represent, are getting exactly what they've paid for. It is an above-the-board transaction, and a fundamentally conservative one at that. The peddling of the public influence is now fully privatized.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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