Sounding Off:

What do we call conspiracy theories anymore? Do we consider the effort to bring down President Obama a conspiracy or just partisan politics?

Neoconservative forces control the Republican Party and lead the unified campaign to regain power. With their simplistic agenda — the dominance of the free market and a paucity of government, at least for social causes — powerful corporations are their allies. Their legislative program is simple, too: tax breaks for the rich, jingoistic rhetoric and cuts in all social programs.

Thus, after a decade in power and unrestrained greed, neoconservatives fostered powerful business interests, a media owned and controlled by a few corporations, and minimal social programs. For them, dialing back the huge plutocratic gains during neoconservative rule is repugnant.

The corporate monolith has been enabled by a pliant government. It has blossomed with the neoconservative movement planned years ago, but gained impetus with Richard Nixon and became central during the George W. Bush regime.

Now the plutocratic infrastructure is established, helped by members of Congress who were compromised and swept up by a tsunami of pressure and greed.

The bottom line is that when neocons are not in government power, their No. 1 directive is to get back into power. Health-care reform could well lead to changing an order they have spent billions to establish and is well entrenched.

With money, power and media, a powerful attack machine has been in place back to Bill Clinton’s administration. Neoconservative forces were relentless in bringing Clinton down, dogging him with his every utterance and diluting any influence he might have for social reform. Republicans and powerful interests, including pharma, the health-care industry and the American Medical Assn., unleashed a firestorm to defeat health-care reform.

This pattern continues with Obama. Republicans and the corporate power structure behind them use any weakness, any shred of prejudice, any propaganda advantage their powerful machine can exploit.

The major media forces report and dance around the racial attacks launched against Obama.

During the presidential campaign, Rush Limbaugh provided no doubt he is a racist when he mocked and derided Obama by continually playing “Barack the Magic Negro.”

Racism also seethes in some places in the South. Last June, Sherri Goforth, a 20-year veteran of Tennessee politics, sent a mass e-mail showing dignified portraits of 43 presidents and the 44th as a pair of white eyes with a black background.

Such disrespect to an American president would have gotten a black man lynched in Goforth’s South a few decades back.

The Fox Near-News cavalcade of character assassins includes Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and now Glenn Beck.

A recovering alcoholic, if not a recovering fool, Beck cheer-led the 9/12 project, this while deviously calling Obama a racist. Imitating the Fox News’ vitriol, 9/12 conservative protesters in Washington displayed a number of racist placards. One said, “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African.” While others spoke of burying him with Ted Kennedy, there were images of hate and derision, including those of Hitler and the Joker (reminiscent of the white-faced clown).

E-mail from the never-ending right-wing sources depict him as a monkey on an Aunt-Jemima-type waffle box and sardonically joke about calling the White House something else. “High Society — Obama on Drugs & The Racist Drug War” clip made Internet stops last month. The videos depicting Obama as part of a black drug culture are endemic.

Tea Party right-wingers did witch-doctor placards of Obama. When Obama was pushing a stimulus bill, the New York Post, a Rupert Murdoch holding, published a cartoon showing the police shooting a chimp saying, “We’ll have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”

Can we doubt Jimmy Carter’s comment that racism is one of the driving forces behind the relentless and often scurrilous attacks on Obama?

Neoconservatives can always count on one thing: Major news sources will give ample coverage to their racist attacks. Whether they originate on the Internet, in staged rallies or tea parties, any public forum of the right wing’s choice will be represented.

With seemingly clean hands, the right wing knows how to use the media, and the media thrives on the lies, hatred and rancor they are fed. Sarah Palin, for example, just posts her death-panel lies on Facebook and they magically appear in newspapers and on television.

Whoever the Democratic president, you can count on more tailored attacks on character, whether real or manufactured. For Clinton, it was his overactive libido; for Obama, it’s his race.

For neoconservatives, it doesn’t matter. Getting the job done justifies any means to accomplish it. And bringing down the country with their relentless effort for power is not even considered.

Neoconservatives really believe they know what is best for America. They believe their manipulation and deceit of the public to gain power is like a parental privilege. They are confident that a right-wing representative for them can be manipulated for their cause.

The Republican successor to Bush could very well be another figure favoring corporate power over the people, who takes pride in an incurious mediocrity. Palin might already be the tentative right-wing choice for 2012.

By then, they hope to bring down Obama and the Democrats.

JIM HOOVER is a Huntington Beach resident.