How big is rightwing victimology? We now have two data points, and both say the order-of-magnitude range is 10,000 to 1!
Two months ago I would never have never imagined we could actually quantify the magnitude of rightwing victimology, even roughly. But we now have two data points, both of which fall roughly into the magnitude range of 10,000 to 1. That means that rightwingers feel they're being victimized if their advantage over perceived adversaries is less than 10,000 to 1. If the advantage is a mere 1,000 to 1, they feel overwhelmed by 10-1 odds. If the advantage is 100 to 1, they feel inundated by 100-1 odds. In fact, the ratio is even higher than that. Here's the story:
Update: Republican strategist John Feehery on Ed Shultz just said that Move-On raised so much money in the last election that this ruling will level the playing field.
Plus, the little guy is employed by corporations so they can be confident that they'll be represented by them.
& pointing out, among other things, that in 2008 the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) Sector spent 12.5 times as much as MoveOn, and that if corporations could spend without limit, Chevron's 2008 profits were 626.9 times as much as MoveOn spent, while ExxonMobile's 2008 profits were 1,185.6 times as much as MoveOn spent.
I concluded that this line of argument was so preposterous that Feehery would be better off touting Saddam's WMDs.
But, apparently, it's time to party like it's March of 2003. Digby again:
The Christian Science Monitorreports on Obama's weekly address on the Supreme Court decision and the article concludes with this perfect illustration of right wing ideology:
"To those for whom MoveOn.org and the countless left-wing 527 operations are the forces of truth and justice, and corporations the font of rich evil men of the 1930's plutocratic cartoons, this case is a disaster for the commonweal," writes Clarice Feldman on the conservative Pajamas Media website. "But for those of us who think free speech is inviolate, and more important in the context of elections than it is in flag burnings or obscenity cases, this decision is a long overdue righting of a preposterous error of legislative judgment.
Move-On, which polls its members and spends the money they send it specifically for the purpose of political activism is equivalent to billion dollar corporations which have only one goal and purpose: profits. And up until now, the poor corporations have been hamstrung having only been allowed to lobby, advertise their products and spend their money in any way they see fit except outright sponsorship of politicians. It's been terribly unfair to them, which is why they are so powerless in our system today. (Indeed, one could probably argue, and I'm sure we'll see it soon, that this is the reason our economy is in shambles.)
Forget the ideology, just think of the victimology for a moment, and think of the parallels with another example of rightwing victimology I wrote about recently--Rick Warren's invocation of the myth of mass Christian martyrdom as a way of deflecting attention from his connections to the Uganda "kill the gays" bill sponsors ("Rick Warren and the martyr mythology of the religious right").
Warren cited a figure of 146,000 Christian martyrs per year, but a website tracking Christian martyrs couldn't even fill up five slots with martyrs from the previous year. Of course any deaths from religious persecution are a moral outrage, which is why America's secular tradition of religious freedom is so precious. But given how many gays are harassed and killed in the name of God, we're simply trying to get a sense of how realistic rightwing Christian's sense of their own victimization is. And so giving them the benefit of the doubt, let's say it's 5 per year. Compared to the claim of 146,000, That's victimology inflation in the 10^4 range--29,200, to be exact.
That's amazingly close to the range in the current case, once we go beyond just citing the most profitable corporations, and consider all corporate profits in 2008--which totalled $1,109 billion (BEA News Release March 26, 2009, (Table 11)), which is 29,089.98 time the amount that MoveOn contributed in 2008--almost exactly the same as the figure from the martyrdom example, 29,200. In fact, the two numbers differ by just 0.4%. That's an amazing close correlation between the two figures. When I first thought of doing this, I thought that the odds were pretty good that the two figures might turn out to be the same order of magnitude--and they did. But this is ridiculous.
Forget what I said before about 10,000-to-1 ratios. Just to be on the safe side, we'll round it down to 29,000-to-1.
p.s. Just a reminder of how small a part of Obama's support came from the entire category of liberal groups (about 1/20th of the total):
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