Monday, February 09, 2015

…By Any Other Name…

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
 By any other name would smell as sweet."
 ~ Juliet
 (From Romeo & Juliet, Act II, Scene 2)
It is still well over a year before the campaign and I can tell you already that this is going to be UGLY! On top of the news that the Koch brothers are planning on buying the election by spending over a billion dollars on it; they are doing a bit of emergency image repair by running (what are called in the industry) "Image Ads."

During every news program that I have seen for the past couple weeks, there was one of these ads for Koch industries informing the viewers that Koch employs a lot of regular every day people and expounding on the good things about Koch that they want us to remember.

But how does this change anything? What purpose do these ads serve? The answer? "None!"

These ads do not tell you anything that you don't already know. They are not advertising a service or a product as there is nothing that Koch sells that the average consumer can buy. The only thing that these ads do is to try to desensitize the electorate to the fact that the Koch brothers have a habit of buying elections. The purpose of these ads is to try and change the image of the brothers from a cross between Scrooge McDuck and Montgomery Burns to something between Daddy Warbucks and George Bailey.

Please tell me that this will not work! Unfortunately, I know the industry and the American public better than that – of course it will work. To paraphrase Juliet: "B--- S--- by any other name still smells!"

Wherever you are today, I hope that you can tell the difference between the Rose and the BS!

Don Bergquist – February 09, 2015 – Lakewood, Colorado, USA

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