_{Credit: Flickr, DonkeyHotey}

Last week our unstable president removed himself from the running for an honor for which he was not in the running: to be Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. Time will need an alternative awardee. I nominate the Koch Brothers – talk about winning so much they’re tired of winning!

The Brothers have it working  – just the other day The Meredith Corporation bought Time, using a heavy infusion of cash from none other than the Koch Brothers. It just seems like capitalist karma for Time to name their new owners Men of the Year.

And they deserve it too, because America is Koch Country. Sure they can’t stand Donald Trump but wasn’t the climate change denialist Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency as nice a make-up gift as the president could offer? And then there is Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. A man who’d cheerfully allow a truck driver to freeze to death isn’t going to look for ways to enforce employee safety regulations, a prime concern of the Kochs.

Then there is the current tax bill debate, where the Kochs and their friends have commanded Republicans to jump and the GOP has shot off like Michael Jordan on a trampoline. Just consider this recent headline and quote from The Hill:

Damn straight and don’t say they haven’t been warned, from a superb recent account by the Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey:

Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the boys already bollixed the repeal of Obamacare and the Koch’s message to them was pretty subtle: nice Congress you have there, be a shame if something happened to it.

The bill was hitting some choppy water yesterday, but that was because, as reported by the New York Times, some Republican senators don’t believe it was doing enough for the wealthy:

A recent Quinnipiac Poll shows 25% approve and 52% disapprove of the Republican tax plan. So much for the old Median Voter Theorem in political science. It will be replaced by the Koch Contributor Theorem.

And that is enough to make the Koch Brothers Time’s Men of the Year.