Almost three-quarters of Americans don't like the government shutdown. Only five days old, Americans are starting to feel pain: furloughs, no paychecks, services shut down. Mothers who rely on WIC benefits are needing to scramble to feed their children. Parents who use Headstart are now trying to find daycare for their toddlers instead of pre-school. Labs doing critical research are shutting down. The pain will only increase the longer the shutdown exists.

But there's a small handful of Americans who are not feeling the pain. They sit in their privileged offices thrilled by this turn of events, because it is exactly what they engineered:

Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.

Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.

It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.

“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A. Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”

These un-American bastards are the ones who have commanded the GOP to take hostages because they lost in a Democratic battle. They lost. Unwilling to take "no" for an answer because they think their needs supersede 300 million other Americans, they reach into their deep pockets, they pour poison into the ears of their puppets in the conservative media to echo to through to the low-info voters, and they lean on the elected officials they helped fund into office and they essentially declare war on America.

So the question has to be asked and it's one that the GOP needs to answer: who are they working for? Because it sure doesn't look like they're working for their constituents or for the betterment of the country.