When Sue Lowden, a Republican candidate for Harry Reid's Nevada Senate seat, suggested that patients offer chickens to their doctors in exchange for medical treatment, there were plenty of quips at her expense. But anyone can type jokes on the Internet; it takes a world-class imp like Stephen Colbert to haul out a menagerie of living animals in the name of satire. On Monday's episode of The Colbert Report, the ever-deadpan host produced a live chicken from beneath his desk--as well as a parakeet, a rabbit, a duck, and what may or may not have been an actual dead trout--and declared his wholehearted support for Lowden's barter proposal:

Yes. As a conservative, Lowden wants us to return to a simpler time when you could give a few beaver pelts to the village barber so he would drill a hole in your skull to release the demons.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Indecision 2010 Midterm Elections - Sue Lowden
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As a side note, it's unclear how the KFC Double Down fits into Colbert's chickens-to-dollars conversion, though it definitely seems like it would represent inflation of some kind.

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