Oh, those poor victimized conservatives!

Jon Stewart offers a montage of the complaints by poor, underprivileged oppressed conservatives.

The Daily Show - GOP - Special Victims Unit
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Who could ever imagine that the conservatives have so much to put up with?

The ultra-wealthy plutocrats have declared war on America

The Citizen's United Supreme Court Decision has unleashed a storm of money into American politics as the ultra-wealthy plutocrats try to destroy or take control of American government. They cannot accept that there is another political power in this nation that rivals their own. Some of the individuals involved were named in an earlier post here. Frank Rich at the New York Times has provided additional detail to flesh out this story.

...local chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker. Last week the same Tea Party Patriots leader who bragged to the National Journal about all those small donations announced a $1 million gift from a man she would identify only as an entrepreneur. The donor’s hidden identity speaks even louder than the size of the check. As long as we don’t know who he is, we won’t know what orders he’s giving either.

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

However much these corporate contributors may share the Tea Party minions’ antipathy toward President Obama, their economic interests hardly overlap. The rank and file Tea Partiers say they oppose government spending and deficits. The billionaires have no problem with federal spending as long as the pork is corporate pork. They, like most Republican leaders in 2008, supported the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout. They also don’t mind deficits as long as they get their outsize cut of the red ink — $3.8 trillion worth if all the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

But while these billionaires’ selfish interests are in conflict with the Tea Party’s agenda, they are in complete sync with the G.O.P.’s Washington leadership. The Republicans’ new “Pledge to America” promises the $3.8 trillion addition to the deficit and says nothing about serious budget cuts or governmental reforms that might remotely offset it. Surfing the Beltway talk shows last Sunday, you couldn’t find one without a G.O.P. politician adamantly refusing to specify a single program he might cut at, say, the Department of Education (Pell grants?) or the National Institutes of Health (cancer research?). And that’s just the small change. Everyone knows that tax cuts for the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons must come out of Social Security and Medicare payments for everybody else.

The tea partiers are masquerading as a grass roots movement, but in fact they are an astroturf stalking host for the wealthy conservatives who are still angry that during the Great Depression FDR kept them from grabbing the power which they feel entitled to. The Great Recession is their next chance. They have been buidling for this opportunity since the hapless Jimmy Carter let Ronald Reagan grab the American Presidency in 1980.

The effort by the ultrawealthy to control America

Conservatism is a stalking horse for the political takeover of America by a few ultra-wealthy families. Here's how Paul Krugman describes it:

As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultra wealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run.

This is not new. Bryan Burrough writes in his excellent book The Big Rich about the "Big Four", the wealthiest oil barons in Texas who funded conservatives such as the John Birch Society as far back as the 1950's and who, before that, directed the Texas Democratic Party to do everything possible to sabotague Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Who were the "Big Four?" Roy Cullen, H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson. More recently Texas has included multimillionaire realtor and home builder Bob Perry who is famous for among other political things pushing the Swift Boat Veteran's scam to defeat John Kerry for President. Perry has a lot of control in the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature where he works to water down any legislation that would make home builders financially responsible for building shoddy homes.

Of course it's not all Texas billionaires. There is also Richard Mellon Scaife who is the billionaire owner and publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He was a With $1.2 billion, Scaife, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune and currently has at least $1.2 billion. He funded many of the most racdical attacks on Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Of course the super conservative Joseph Coors should not be overlooked in this listing of some of the American oligarchs pushing for political and economic control of this nation. Wikipedia states this about Joe Coors' conservative activities:

Coors was perhaps best known for his conservative politics. A founding member of the Heritage Foundation along with Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner, Coors provided $250,000 to the think tank to cover its first year budget. He was also involved with the founding of the Free Congress Foundation and the Council for National Policy. He was a member of Ronald Reagan's Kitchen Cabinet, helping finance Reagan's political career as governor of California and U.S. president. [1] Coors was also known to have privately donated $65,000 to buy a light cargo plane for the Contras effort in Nicaragua during Reagan's presidency. That donation went through National Security Council adviser Oliver North.

Without these and other wealthy individuals pushing conservatism in America there would be no real conservative movement.

Although he does not seem to have been upfront as a major right-wing political actor as the names above have, an important social conservative Republican is Erik Prince. After inheriting his father's fortune of $1.2 billion he quite the Navy and established the mercenary firm Wikipedia:

Prince's father co-founded the Family Research Council with Gary Bauer.[12] Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and wife of former Alticor (Amway) president and Gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos[10], son of Richard DeVos, Sr. (listed by Forbes in 2009 as one of the world's richest men, with a net worth of $4.2 billion).[13]

For a list of the 400 richest people in America, here is the Forbes article. Most either inherited the wealth or married it, so it is not the result of their wealth being a reward for their efforts to add value to society or the economy. For most of them, their main focus in life is to protect their wealth and social position. Why else would their political arm, the conservative Republicans and their astroturf tea partiers, be so adamant about trying to remove all inheritance laws which affect only the largest fortunes?

Conservatives will automatically oppose any Obama nominee or legislative initiative. Plan on it.

The cultural clash between American liberals, mostly represented by Democrats these days, and American Conservatives grows clearer every day as the conservatives complain about whatever the Obama administration does. Case in point from Ed Whelan of the NRO (National Review Online.) Ed objects that the current candidate nominated this morning by President Obama for the Supreme Court seat John Paul Steven's retirement will leave is Elena Kagan. The complaint is not that she is not a competent lawyer, a claim that would be laughable in the face of her credentials. Ed complains that since she grew up in New York City, she did not learn to drive until she was into her twenties.

So what's wrong with that? The job is to be Justice of the Supreme Court, not NASCAR driver. Here's Ed's complaint:

3. There is a striking mismatch between the White House’s populist rhetoric about seeking a justice with a “keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people” and the reality of the Kagan pick.

This supports my position that the core of the so-called liberal-conservative political split in America today is really a culture clash between America's rural culture and the newer urban culture of the big cities. The farm boys really don't like the more sophisticate city types, and they hate losing power to them. Growing up on a farm on in a small town, the car is a necessary tool to get around. In the city there is almost aways public transportation that makes driving a car a lot less necessary. so Ed's complaint is that Elena Kagan is "out of touch with average Americans" because she has not grown up dependent on the automobile from an early age. For her the driver's license at age 16 was not a rite of passage to life as an adult.

Matt Gertz at Media Matters points out

Kagan grew up in New York City, which is one of the most walkable cities in the country and has one of the best public transportation systems nationwide. You don't need a license if you live in NYC, and in fact a large percentage of New Yorkers don't have one: New York City has 5.6 million residents over age 25, but only 3.3 million residents have drivers' licenses.

Somehow to Ed Whelan this means that Elena Kagan cannot understand the "average American."

What Ed is really saying, though, is that he is a rural hick who fears anyone who is somehow different from him. People living in urban areas who have adapted to the urban culture have to be much more tolerant of diverse cultures and behavior than people from smaller towns who simply don't meet and interact with as great a variety in a week or more as someone who lives in a large, walkable city will. The Conservative/Liberal dichotomy really means a rural/urban culture clash.