I think I get now why wealthy conservatives can appear so diabolical one moment, and so mind-numbingly stupid and degenerate the next: Basically, they're backseat drivers. They're people who are neither willing nor apparently able to get anywhere on the basis of their own ideas and sweat, but also bitterly unwilling to just be privileged passengers. Instead, they think they're going to make all the decisions of society without needing to possess any of the skills, accept any of the responsibilities, or put forward any of the efforts of the people they're bossing around.
This is why the Party of the 1% keeps ending up with people like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney at their helm - the mindless, clueless, morally and intellectually fetid products of lifelong economic coddling. The conservative 1% whom the GOP serves - their Inner Party so to speak - is so witless when it comes to exercising responsibility of any kind that you could put them in charge of a fucking aquarium and it would be on fire within five minutes.
Such catastrophic, Mr. Bean-like bumbling as witnessed from Republicans every time they're in government would almost be endearing if not for the fact that these people truly do not give the slightest raisin of rat shit what consequences their actions have on the lives of others. In fact, it becomes increasingly clear that the only way they can stay rich at all is by making other people pay - if they personally had to accept the risks and costly externalities they constantly impose on the rest of society, they would burn through every last dime of their fortunes in no time flat. If Mitt Romney had to make his own way in life, he would be some smarmy little prick of an office middle-manager on the model of Bill Lumbergh, or a sleazy used car salesman buying himself a Jacuzzi by tricking old people into signing away their pensions, but it's just not possible to watch the man in action and imagine him building a productive business from scratch.
Creativity, leadership, crisis management, intelligent risk, building loyalty among customers and employees - these are simply not skills in Mitt Romney's wheelhouse, but they haven't had to be: His money has done most of the work for him from the very beginning, putting other people's livelihoods under his influence whom he just doesn't care about hurting so long as he personally stays above the river of shit his own excesses create. The only skillset he's learned is superficial and destructive - the minimal amount of predatory cleverness needed to be a thief, con artist, and parasite when you start out in life with everything and inherit a network of political relationships. And as long as he can keep making other people create his money for him, and also make them bear 100% of the catastrophic long-term cost of his myopic and irresponsible behavior, he can continue to laughably call himself "successful."
But if Bain Capital's impact on the American economy had determined the fortunes of Bain itself, Mitt Romney would not be a wealthy man today. Hell, that would be the case even if the picture were limited to the individual businesses he has taken over, turning productive manufacturing enterprises into nothing more than quick cash-outs with unemployment, loss of health insurance, and the deindustrialization of America as the bottom lines for everyone else. Romney and those like him repeatedly demonstrate that they are not capable of serving anyone but themselves, and that they're only capable of that at other people's expense. And really that's why they're conservatives - because the only set of circumstances in which their worthlessness as people and ineptitude as leaders doesn't end up with them in the poorhouse is one where they make the rules everyone else has to live by.
Frankly, there's just no reason to let them. None. If these backseat-driving sons of bitches don't like how we run our own country and live our own lives, we can let them out at the curb - let them buy some other country's government that will kiss their asses and obey their idiotic commands to drive off a cliff. Their fanatic corporatist priesthood already threatens to "go Galt" often enough, and they certainly have never shied from sending American jobs overseas whenever it suited them anyway, so what is there to lose given that all we ever get from obeying them is poverty, unemployment, and ever-diminishing opportunities?
It's time America sent the message in no uncertain terms to the most useless and ungrateful sector of society - wealthy conservatives: STFU and carry your own weight or GTFO and be prepared to pay an exit tax at the door to compensate this country for the trouble of tolerating you this long.