Barack's Backers

Frank VanderSloot is Mitt Romney’s brother from another mother, a bully only “Mitt the Barber” could love.  He’s your prototypical Mormon tough guy, smiling and genial on the outside, ruthless and manipulative on the inside.

Whether it’s battling a local newspaper trying to report on a story about  Boy Scout molestations, buying up five Idaho radio stations so he can run “last-minute smears of candidates in election campaigns,” or suing anybody and everyone who dares write anything critical of him, Frank VanderSloot is a bully of the first order.

VanderSloot is the richest and most powerful man in Idaho. He is also one of Mitt Romney’s go-to guys.

VanderSloot has become the Romney campaign’s national finance co-chairman; four companies he controls gave a total of $1 million to Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney SuperPAC; he “has held Romney fund-raisers at his Idaho Falls ranch in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns”; and Romney lavishly praised him this way: “Frank’s vision and sense of social responsibility is second to none and he never ceases to amaze me.” Read more at Salon

The latest ploy by the Idaho billionaire is to claim he’s a victim. All day long on Tuesday, VanderSloot showed up on a continuous loop on Fox News, pretending to be a poor little businessman who was being persecuted by President Obama for donating to Mitt Romney’s campaign. Fellow Fox News bully Bill O’Reilly even went so far as to say that “some people” might say the President was engaged in “political terrorism” for naming VanderSloot as a million dollar donor to a Super Pac aimed at defeating President Obama, and was “a bitter  foe to the gay rights movement.” Both of which are true.

For his part in pretending to be a regular Joe while attacking the President of the United States, Frank VanderSloot earned our Republican Bully of the Day.

Here are a few more facts about VanderSloot if you’re interested.

• Frank VanderSloot grew up in Cocolalla, Idaho, about a half hour north of Hayden Lake, the area famous for being the Aryan Nations homeland. He still has ties to the area and his mother and two sisters still reside there.
• He joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age 17, and graduated from Sandpointe High School in 1966. He did his mission in the Netherlands.
• He attended Ricks College and Brigham Young University, graduating with a B.A. in marketing.
• He was a manager at Automatic Data Processing and an executive at Cox Communications before joining Melaleuca in 1985 where he sells mail order dietary supplements and cleaning and personal hygiene supplies.
• VanderSloot is on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee. He’s one of the biggest contributors to the Restore Our Future Super PAC.
• He has six kids, “several” ranches, and 5000 head of cattle. He was divorced and remarried a woman who has eight children. He has tithed over 100 million dollars to the Mormon Church.