No, Charles Koch is not some harmless old dude posing for a dentures ad.

Hold on to your laptops: According to The New York Times, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid has an idea. He wants Dems to launch a media counterattack against two prominent plutocrats who are on a mission to destroy democracy in America — what’s left of it — by spending untold millions on blatantly dishonest pro-Republican campaign ads:

Democrats say the strategy of spotlighting the Koch brothers’ activities is politically shrewd. The majority leader was particularly struck by a presentation during a recent Senate Democratic retreat, which emphasized that one of the best ways to draw an effective contrast is to pick a villain, one of his aides said. And by scolding the Koch brothers, Mr. Reid is trying to draw them out, both to raise their public profile, and also to help rally the Democratic base.

“Well, duh,” my friend Swamp Rabbit said as I fed the wood stove in my Tinicum shack. “You ain’t gotta ‘pick a villain’ when he’s right there in the flesh, swinging a bat at you.”

“Not unless you’re a modern-day Democrat,” I said. “Dems have to check the polls before they defend themselves, even when they’re in the middle of getting their asses kicked.”

It’s true. The billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, have been demonstrating for years that they are serious about destroying labor unions, minimum-wage laws, environmental regulations, government-sponsored health care and everything else that might interfere with their money lust and benefit average citizens. There is no right-wing yahoo candidate they wouldn’t spend a fortune to elect. They are impossible to caricature. The great film director Frank Capra couldn’t have invented plutocrats as vile and greedy as the Kochs.

And yet the Dems in Washington are only now getting around to fighting back, even though midterm elections are less than a year away and the Kochs, for months, have been cranking out expensive propaganda on behalf of Republican candidates.

“I know Dems these days ain’t got no courage and don’t have no heart,” Swamp Rabbit said. “But ain’t there a few Dems in Congress that at least have a brain?”

“I don’t know, rabbit. Maybe they should ask the Wizard of Oz to help.”

But that’s a dead end, too. The closest thing Dems have to the Great Oz is Barack Obama, and he turned out to be an even bigger fraud than the Wiz in the old movie.