Frank Rich has a magnificent column on their billionaires, the ones who fund the Hard Right (and fund it and fund it and fund it).
His take-off points are the Beckinalia in DC and Jane Mayer's seminal New Yorker article that exposes the really big money behind the Tea Party "movement".
(I put "movement" in quotes because the Tea Party isn't a movement in my view. Movement Conservatism is a movement; the Tea Party eruption is just a well-funded — and fully confused — manifestation.)
A taste of the Rich article (my emphasis):
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.It's not the evil you should notice. It's the scope. Their billionaires have been at it since Roosevelt, and they'll be at it until the New Deal is a mis-remembered aberration. (Texas school books will call it the "Bad Deal" and no one will correct them.)
There's a reason their billionaires are so persistent — that's the only group Movement Conservatism really represents, Big Money boys and their right to rule like kings. The peasants who worship them are just tools.
So who represents us? Where are our billionaires? Naturally, our billionaires will actually work for, oh, justice, and humanity. Not horribly personal, I admit, and the incentives are all wrong. But surely there's a Roosevelt out there somewhere.
And don't say George Soros; as I pointed out here, George Soros is a "former member of the Carlyle Group." Compared to the determination in just one Koch finger, Soros is a dabbler, a dilettante.
So, a must-read from Frank Rich; you can find it here. Jane Mayer's must-read New Yorker article is here. And we've included a video of Jane Mayer here, interviewed by Rachel Maddow.
(Where's my blogging knife?)
GP
