Monday, November 26, 2012

Ahhhhh, yesssss...

From Shrummy:

The GOP Faces Years in the Wilderness After 2012 Election Losses

Sensible Republicans seeking to renew the viability of a conservative party that seems out of touch after a stinging defeat at the polls are being denounced as ‘heretics.’ Robert Shrum on why the party might never find its way back.
Sensible Republicans?! Perhaps it's simply that abject defeat begets a semblance of thought.

[...] Outside the South, President Obama defeated his opponent 55 to 45 percent, winning a landslide there as well as in the Electoral College. The bottom line: Romney got elected president of the old confederacy.
That's good. When the mouthbreathers secede, they can call him. He'll answer the phone. Hasn't got much else to do these days. He can take over another failure, put it deep in debt, and sell it for pennies on the dollar and further enrich himself in the process. One caveat: whoever buys the South has to tow it away. Far, far away. I would suggest the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. Then sink it.

Obama pollster Joel Benenson responded that such shifts may require two or three more cycles of presidential loss. [...]
...

That’s not where realistic Republican strategists want their party to be. But four overriding realities militate against a GOP return to the White House in 2016 and perhaps for several campaigns beyond.
...

Second, the nature of the Republican primary electorate hamstrings the party’s capacity to adapt. The religious right and the true believers who dominate the nominating process have their own explanations or rationalizations for 2012. Romney wasn’t conservative enough. [...]

Schmidt recommended that Republicans dispense with the Iowa caucuses, where the litmus test is who’s most for Jesus, according to the narrow measures of right-wing fundamentalists. That change won’t happen, not yet; religious and movement forces on the far right won’t yield their hold on the primary process and their veto power over the nominee. In the last two elections, they sacrificed at least five Senate seats for the sake of ideological ultra-orthodoxy. So why won’t they demand their kind of presidential candidate—no doubts, no flip-flops, always there with them? And they believe the country will come around to them. Former Moral Majoritarian Ralph Reed smoothly explained how. Yes, there has to be change, to “combine core principles with outreach.” But outreach to whom, if the core principles are reaction and intolerance?
Outreach to fewer and fewer scared old white hypocrite Christers, that's who. Continue the march, Repugs!

Instead, in the throes of their self-proclaimed reexamination, many Republicans remind me of a scene in Theodore H. White’s classic The Making of the President 1960. JFK spoke in the Boston garden on the last night of the campaign, with politicians and ward heelers smoking cigars arranged in rows behind him. As the crowd cheered, White wrote, a look passed across their faces. You could see what the pols were thinking: Kennedy has a trick; if only I could figure it out, I could be president.

It was a false and easy conceit. And if what the GOP looks for now is a trick, what it will find is a way deeper into the wilderness.
The GOP has missed the point entirely. They pimped off the fringe right for votes and the tables got turned and now the GOP is the trick. Deep, deep, deep in the wilderness is a good place for them. They could only be improved by being turned into bear scat.

Yes, I'm enjoying the, er, scat outta all this. We sure as scat had it coming.

Update:

If you have as strange a sense of humor as I do, go read Numbers 14, which is the story of the wandering Israelites and an eerily uncanny parallel to the plight of the Repugs. Their plight, our schadenfreude. Heh.


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