If only that were all...

The Denver Post: "Horsing around"

If hard work were all it took to make $250,000, more than 19 out of 20 people would manage it. Education doesn't come free, and it gets further away from free for people like me every moment.

If you work hard, you can get somewhere. But ambition alone doesn't determine things. It never has. Hard work alone doesn't determine things. It never has.

It helps to have a good start.

What's at work now is not envy. Oh that envy was the worst thing we felt. How about resentment? How about betrayal? How about a complete lack of patience with an agenda that has continually rewarded hard work less and less, with the promise that one day things would turn around and we'd prosper more. It's a mark of the two-faced nature of such "conservative" policies that even in the best of recent times, people were again and again on the receiving end of pink slips, even while executive compensation skyrocketed. If there is envy, it's generated by a system that seems purpose built to put more and more distance between the average person and the top.

These brilliant people, who earn every dollar, somehow managed to destroy the financial industry. Despite everything they promised, their leadership, their guidance led us down the garden path to ruin. It's not envy, it's anger. We've got our own interests, just as the rich do, and while they've been pissed off, with Limbaugh's help, at how terribly high the taxes are today (look in a history book folks, it's been much, much worse.), and how much regulation they suffer under, they've been transgressing against those interests time and time again, supposedly for our own good. And yet, the eventual result, the sum total of years worth of our sacrifice to them has been economic disaster. After all the chances we gave them to make their brand of laissez faire capitalism work, they've utterly failed to deliver to us the real returns on our investment that we worked our asses off for them to get.

This is not about envy, or not earning our way up in life. Quite the opposite. This about looking after our own interests, rather than sticking with a system where envy is all you've got, that and an empty stomach. We don't want what they have half as much as we want what we've earned, what we deserve from business and government alike.

The folks at AIG didn't earn those bonuses, not in any real sense of the term. They failed, and that failure would have been punished with the loss of their jobs, if we, the people they transgressed against, time and again, hadn't stepped in. If it weren't for our generosity, they'd be out of work. And now, they repay our generosity, by rewarding themselves for a nonexistent success.

Rush, your people have worn our patience down considerably, to the point where we stopped buying into your party's platforms. People have gone back to liberalism because they see no profit in continuing to support an agenda where the primary direction of envy is of the top for the resources we on the bottom still have.