Thursday, November 6, 2008

The GOP Pundits Reaction: Most Still Don't Get It

One would think after getting one's ass handed to you in an election as just happened, it would cause a lot of soul searching among the losers: What did we do wrong? What do we need to do more? How do we better convey our message? What in the message needs to be changed.

There are some that get it. Cal Thomas, surprisingly, leads the way, suggesting the Christian Right do the radical thing and follow Jesus' example, give to Caeser what is Caeser's, and try persuasion by example socially, rather than via politics. George Will warns of the dangers of becoming a regional party with "no intellectual seeds of intellectual rebirth".

But on balance, they just don't get it.
Rich Galen wants to pretend that it was all about the economy, which is the easiest way to avoid responsibility for the loss. It's like a football team that gets beaten badly and blames the rain. Ben Shapiro, never to be outdone for the intellectual low ground, and master of MSU, Ben Shapiro claims it's all about 'Americans’ puerile need for unity through self-congratulatory, cathartic membership in a broad, transformative political movement.' This guy should write a psycho horror novel series called 'DENIAL'. Michael Medved pretends the Obama victory had nothing to do with values. It's just another version of the "we lost because we are better than them" argument, which solves no problems, and thus guarantees further failures. Many of them join Robert Knight in clinging to the notion that there was anything relevant about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? There is nothing you are going to tell America about those pseudo issues that we don't already know. Boring. Knight pours salt into that rhetorical wound by implying that it was the media's fault there wasn't much substantive discussion of "judicial activism, marriage, abortion, gun control, cultural depravity, and illegal immigration", when it was the McCain campaign raising pseudo issue after pseudo issue, and made an incompetent loon from Alaska the story, first by nominating her, and then by pretending she should get a pass from the media test every other candidate for VP had to pass.

The Republican party had better get it through its head that it lost because it ran a horribly weak candidate, a la 1996, insulted the country's collective intelligence by nominating someone completely unqualified to be his running mate (a la Ross Perot), and is simply out of step with America on many serious issues. The anti-abortion, abstinence-only, prayer-in-school, science-denying faction is going to shrink in the next 4 years, and right now that's all you appeal to. Keep that attitude, pretend "Palin 2012" is anything but a sick joke, you'll suffer a McGovern-like wipe out, and America will lose the conservative check on liberal excesses we desperately need. You just have to stop catering to the reality-deniers.

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