jpn,
This is just non sense.  Even neocons aren't insane enough to want to destroy a program simply because it is popular.

Bush was not trying to destroy social security, and he was not even trying to privatize it.  He was trying to change the rules to make it more like a retirement savings account and allow people to invest their money, which would give the potential to earn more than the 4 to 6 % interest that the SS trust fund currently makes in government bonds, and would make whatever interest it made not be paid by the US taxpayer.

Remember, SS recipients are guaranteed to receive benefits for their lifetime, not just until the amount they contributed over their working life runs out.  When the amount people are being paid overuns the amounts people paid in plus the interest earned, the system will be insolvent.  Simple math.  The question is when this will occur.

Personally, I think Bush's plan is not the correct one as it changes the nature of the system too much and potentially destroys the insurance aspect of it.

I however feel no compunction to lie about his plan in order to make that argument.

Ryan, IMHO, you have not, as gomper stated, produced viable evidence to support your claim that 99.9% of Republicans think alike.  For example, though I'm a republican, I'm pro choice, I'm pro gay marriage, Far from evangelical, I'm an agnostic.  I'm pro gun rights. Pro Constitution, anti war, pro personal freedom, pro small federal government, pro personal accountability, anti welfare state, anti federal reserve, anti fiat dollar,

And most of my friends are Democrats with money.  Ryan, you are either very young and inexperience, or middle aged and ignorant.  By your recent posts, You have a chip on your shoulder against Republicans.  I believe your real problem is with your relatives, your parents in particular, and that you have shifted your anger at them to your assault on Republicans. 

You will have to learn to distinguish  whats important and real from what is petty and driven by anger.

To answer the main question "why do they think like this?" the reason is human nature. Human nature is inherrently conservative, if it worked in the past it ought to work again. Unfortunately for human nature, history is inherrently liberal, the problems of the past are not the problems of now. That is why I believe conservative parties have been so successful, they appeal to people that fear the future and the changes it might bring, and I'm sure everyone fears the future at some time. Liberals on the other hand tend to work for a better tomorow and not so much the issues of today this makes them less popular in general, but grants them success when conservatives screw something up.

On Wednesday night, the CBS anchor asked Senator John McCain’s wife, Cindy, about her views on abortion, and discovered that Mrs. McCain, usually so impenetrably poised and well prepared, had difficulty describing her husband’s position on Roe v. Wade, or her own. (She said he did not want to overturn it, until Ms. Couric assured her that he did oppose Roe v. Wade. Mrs. McCain, looking a bit confused, then said she, too, wanted the legality of abortion to be determined by individual states.)

At the end of the interview, Ms. Couric told her viewers that the campaign had clarified Mrs. McCain’s position: “They told us that, like Laura Bush, Mrs. McCain does not favor overturning Roe v. Wade, which guarantees the legal right to an abortion.”

Sometimes even candidate's own spouses don't know how radically they want to change the nation:

nytimes.com/2008/09/05/us/politics/05watch.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

So I guess now Cindy McCain understands that her husband's flip-flop on abortion (in order to be president, "Mr. Straightalker" now says he wants Roe v. Wade overturned) is for real. So now she, too, is for making abortions illegal again.
At least for now...
I guess.

There is no question that a huge percentage of Republicans vote Republican based solely on the issue of Abortion, solely on the issue of Gun Rights, solely on the issue of Taxes, etc. This is evidenced by George Bush's relelection win in 2004 which was the direct result of single-issue evangelical voters turning out to the polls to vote solely based on Abortion and/or Gay Marriage. This is not an opinion. This is a fact.

 
No this is not fact, this is your opinion, one which you have supported with your observations, but not evidence or facts.

Evangelicals Say They Led Charge For the GOP

By Alan Cooperman and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, November 8, 2004; Page A01

As the presidential race was heating up in June and July, a pair of leaked documents showed that the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign was urging Christian supporters to turn over their church directories and was seeking to identify "friendly congregations" in battleground states.

Those revelations produced a flurry of accusations that the Bush campaign was leading churches to violate laws against partisan activities by tax-exempt organizations, and even some of the White House's closest religious allies said the campaign had gone too far.

But the untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign. The White House struggled to stay abreast of the Christian right and consulted with the movement's leaders in weekly conference calls. But in many respects, Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon.

This was particularly true of the same-sex marriage issue. One of the most successful tactics of social conservatives -- the ballot referendums against same-sex marriage in 13 states -- bubbled up from below and initially met resistance from White House aides, Christian leaders said.

In dozens of interviews since the election, grass-roots activists in Ohio, Michigan and Florida credited President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, with setting a clear goal that became a mantra among conservatives: To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power.

In battlegrounds such as Ohio, scores of clergy members attended legal sessions explaining how they could talk about the election from the pulpit. Hundreds of churches launched registration drives, thousands of churchgoers registered to vote, and millions of voter guides were distributed by Christian and antiabortion groups.

The rallying cry for many social conservatives was opposition to same-sex marriage. But concern about the Supreme Court, abortion, school prayer and pornography also motivated these "values voters." Same-sex marriage, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was "the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term."

For several months after the Massachusetts court decision, evangelical leaders lamented the lack of a popular outcry. That changed July 14, when the Senate rejected the federal marriage amendment. Media reports described the vote as "a big election-year defeat" for the White House. It was, in fact, an election-year bonanza.

Backers of the amendment clogged the Senate switchboard with calls. Perhaps most important, social conservatives shifted their focus to amending state constitutions. They launched petition drives to put amendments banning same-sex marriage to a popular vote, and those drives resulted in grass-roots organizations and voter lists that later fed the Bush campaign.

Ultimately, 13 states approved marriage amendments this year, including 11 on Nov. 2.

Some Democrats suspected that the ballot initiatives were engineered by Rove and the GOP, but religious activists say otherwise. In Michigan, state Sen. Alan Cropsey (R) introduced a bill to ban same-sex marriage in October 2003 and assumed it would have the support of his party. Instead, the Roman Catholic Church in Michigan became the amendment's main booster, spending nearly $1 million to secure its passage.

Charles W. Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, recalled a meeting early this year when Christian leaders warned White House aides that the marriage issue was likely to appear on state ballots and be a big factor in the presidential election.

The Enlistment of Religious Leaders:

According to religious leaders, the conference calls with White House officials started early in the Bush administration and became a weekly ritual as the campaign heated up. Usually, the participants were Rove or Tim Goeglein, head of the White House Office of Public Liaison. Later, Bush campaign chairman Ken Mehlman and Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and the campaign's southeast regional coordinator, were often on the line.

The religious leaders varied, but frequent participants included the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, psychologist James C. Dobson or others from the Colorado-based Focus on the Family, and Colson.

The Bush campaign enlisted thousands of religious "team leaders" in its canvassing efforts. According to activists in battleground states, however, Christian groups were often out ahead of the campaign.

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, advised in mailings to 45,000 churches that their clergy should avoid endorsing a candidate by name from the pulpit. Other than that, "we told them they were absolutely free and should encourage their people to vote their convictions," he said.

Such entreaties appear to have worked. Sekulow said he believes that thousands of clergy members gave sermons about the election, and that many went further than they ever had before. The Rev. Rick Warren, author of the best-selling "The Purpose Driven Life" and one of the most influential ministers in the country, sent a letter to 136,000 fellow pastors urging them to compare the candidates' positions on five "non-negotiable" issues: abortion, stem cell research, same-sex marriage, human cloning and euthanasia.

Dobson, a powerful figure among evangelicals, endorsed Bush -- though he said he was doing so as an individual, not as chairman of Focus on the Family, whose programs are heard on 7,000 radio stations worldwide. "This year the issues were so profound that I felt I simply could not sit it out," Dobson said last week.

Far from sitting it out, Dobson created a separate nonprofit, Focus on the Family Action, which organized six stadium-size rallies to urge Christians in battleground states to "vote their values."

Bush's conservative Christian base was essential to his victory. According to surveys of voters leaving the polls, Bush won 79 percent of the 26.5 million evangelical votes and 52 percent of the 31 million Catholic votes. Turnout soared in conservative areas such as Ohio's Warren County, where Bush picked up 18,000 more votes than in 2000, and local activists said churches were the reason.

Over the summer, the Rev. Bruce Moore, pastor of Warren County's Clearcreek Christian Assembly, gave two sermons explaining a Christian's responsibility to vote. Then he passed out voter registration cards. His 400 congregants circulated them among like-minded friends, registering hundreds more voters.

"On this election, because of the issues before the state of Ohio and the nation, they were passionate," Moore said. "It was all hands on deck. I have never seen a rush for voter registration cards in my life as a minister."

Some Christian leaders perceived not only a threat to biblical morality, but also a winning political issue. Same-sex marriage "is different from abortion," said the Rev. Ronnie Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church of Springdale, Ark. "It touches every segment of society, schools, the media, television, government, churches. No one is left out."

I am a Republican, I am pro-choice.  My immediate family are all Republicans, and are all pro-choice and are atheists.

If the Republican party were run by the single minded, single issue evangelicals you claim are its majority, Hucabee or Romney would be the nominee.

Is any of what I have said really evidence of the true nature of the Republican mindset?  In my opinion, No, what I have provided here are my experiences and opinions and I would not consider them to rise to the status of true evidence.  They are however at least as compelling as arguments as what you have brought to the table.

I also believe you are so mired in your partisan hatred for the Republican party that you sometimes allow emotionality to get the better of you when you are arguing.  This is also something that mature, intelligent adults do from time to time and I certainly know that I am not immune from it, so I will certainly not try to imply that any of your argumentation was childish.