It's the "why" I don't understand

I haven't blogged in a while due to events at home and with my general disgust with the politics at hand but something has been percolating for quite some time and I wish I had a better grip on understanding it which has in turn led to the title itself. I can see some of the selfish reasons that the right is doing what its doing, the old "I got mine" or "the club is full" has a certain cachet of comfort doesn't it? I can certainly appreciate the feeling of stability of maintaining a "status quo" or just being able to tell yourself that now that you're on top you shouldn't have to work that hard anymore. You know, I get that but I guess that a large number of these folks were simply raised differently than I was and this is coming from a man who's now discovered that his mother is now a "birther" and in a bitter argument regarding the validity of the current holder of the highest office proclaimed that she and Dad raised me up to be a "Conservative" and continued on to exhort she wished that she had never sent me off to school if I was going to turn out to be a "liberal".

That kind of sentiment sent a bit of a shudder down my spine but I sat back and just shook my head and wondered just how she got to where she was without our own country being one of the "most liberal" countries in the world during the time that I was growing up. I grew up during Watergate. I grew up watching Spiro Agnew disgraced, watched him resign, watched Nixon besieged, watched him lie, dissemble, delay, prevaricate and eventually resign when it was apparent that he was going to be impeached. Depsite Nixon's despicable acts, I got why Ford pardoned him. I also grew up during a time where the idea that something newer, faster and better was just around the corner. Science was broadening frontiers, possibilities were endless, society was changing. Sex wasn't free, but it wasn't illegal or unheard of to have knowledge of it on a first hand basis (pun/smirk here at your leisure). The end result was that R's were willing to do just about anything to stay in power if a guy like Nixon, who had excellent prospects of being re-elected on his own merits had to sabotage the other side, simply because he could.

Yet here we are today, two generations later, watching these same R idiots parrot the same lines of the same failed economical policies as if yelling them louder will somehow make them more viable. Being in power means more to them than actually solving problems. Having all the wealth in the hands of the rich is a desirable end result. Businesses don't need regulation and when they screw up, so what, deal with it. You have the freedom to agree with them or be libeled with something from the rotating "wheel of hate" if not. For reasons unknown concepts like wealth, freedom and rights are zero sum quantities, if they have less, then that means you have more and that upsets their sense of balance. They keep shouting that if we just leave businesses alone that they'll create more jobs, while at the same time doing their best to shrink government, throwing more people into the workforce, unemployed.

So far, jobs creation hasn't been what anyone would call inspirational and the stimulus package that was crafted is on its last gasp as state governments commit harikuri on its poor and middle class citizens in the name of austerity thinking that spending less will somehow translate to "more" money in the economy and while the media is complicit in perpetuating the misrepresentation of ideals to the public. In their myopic quest for total control of the message what do they hope to achieve? That the media doesn't care who is in charge is laudable, what is laughable is how little they've done to inform the American public regarding what is at stake and how it pertains to their everyday lives.

I have no idea on what it is that these people think they are gaining at the expense of so many people, but when the reckoning comes to settle these accounts, I won't blink when these folks spend their time on their knees in front of the headsman.