Liveblogging from the GOP’s hall of mirrors.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
Today we’re going to discuss the key issue facing the Republican party: how to break out of their self-imposed exile from data, facts, and reality. But, before we do that, we need to know how far the denial actually goes.
Let’s start with Breitbart’s Big Government, in an article that could best be summed up as “Kill The Lawyers Consultants”
There is a larger story here that, up until now, we at Breitbart have not discussed. The left thinks the Republican party is beholden to its billionaire donors. Actually, the Republican party treats these donors as easy marks. The party is actually beholden to a small cadre of political consultants and media buyers who exert total control over the party’s messaging and outreach.
Wow. A conservative actually admits the Republican website things Sheldon Adelson, Foster Freiss, and all the other GOP sugardaddies are just johns.
Charles Krauthammer is up next, asking about “The Way Forward”:
Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that.
CONSERVATISM CANNOT FAIL; IT CAN ONLY BE FAILED.
And now Michael Grerson, “Renewing the Republican party”:
Republican adjustments to cultural trends, particularly among millennials, will be difficult — although candidates could start by being unambiguous in their condemnations of rape. In fact, the tone taken by most Republicans on cultural issues has shifted considerably over the past several years. The pro-life movement has become more realistic and incremental. Republican opposition to gay marriage is increasingly falling back to the defense of institutional religious freedom. With nearly 50 percent of Romney’s support coming from religious conservatives, there is no rational strategy that employs them as a political foil. But it is more advisable than ever to make public arguments about morality in aspirational rather than judgmental ways.
NO RETREAT! NO SURRENDER!
Next up: Alan Charles Raul, “For Republicans, less purity and more reality”
This manifesto for reformation should resonate with well over half the country. And we should have plenty of boosters for this approach. Beyond the obvious “A-Team” of Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Rob Portman and Marco Rubio, moderate conservatives including Condi Rice and Jon Huntsman should be welcomed warmly and Colin Powell recruited back into the fold. Bringing over new leaders, such as the new senator from Texas and tea party favorite Ted Cruz, would help set the stage for reality-based Republicanism.
It’s clear that drinking too much tea has left us jittery. Some lower-octane ideological purity has to be part of a new Republican movement.
Any list of future GOP “superstars” that includes Ted Cruz, who thinks that George Soros is bankrolling a UN operation to destroy America’s golf courses, automatically gets disqualified as being completely and utterly wrong.
The GOP itself has no idea what went wrong:
Though it seems hard to believe, in the past few days there have been multiple signs that Mitt Romney and other top Republicans truly didn’t consider the possibility that they might lose. Romney reportedly didn’t write a concession speech, planned to set off a $25,000 fireworks display in Boston Harbor on Election Night, and was ready to launch a transition site for President-Elect Romney. (Perhaps it was smart to be prepared, but the screen shots that accidentally made it online are just sad.) On Thursday, an anonymous adviser told CBS News that Romney was “shell-shocked” by the loss and said of the campaign, “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.” It seems the same was true of GOP party leaders. The Washington Post reports that they intended to start doing polls on Election Night “to immediately begin laying the groundwork for midterm congressional elections and a Romney 2016 reelection bid.” Instead they’re launching a massive two-month review to determine what went so wrong for the Republican Party.
Allen West is seeking an unnecessary recount in Florida:
Democrat Patrick Murphy leads West by a margin of 160,328 votes to 157,872 votes, or about 50.39 percent to 49.61 percent, according to the Florida Division of Elections.
But the lead of about 0.8 percent is outside the 0.5 margin that Florida law requires for a recount.
“If the percentage does not fit within the statutory criteria for recounts, there exists no statutory mechanism for a candidate, group, or anyone else to have a recount done by the state or any supervisor of elections,” said Division of Elections spokesman Chris Cate to CBS4.
West’s campaign issued a long statement Wednesday on its Facebook page saying the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections “clearly ignored proper rules and procedures, and the scene at the Supervisor’s office last night could only be described as complete chaos.”
“There are still provisional ballots, absentee ballots and military ballots to be counted across the district so at this point in time we don’t know what the margin will be,” said West spokesman Tim Edison. “There are several thousand votes still to be counted. We are only a couple hundred votes outside of an automatic recount.”
Foster Freiss is lamenting the opacity of the SuperPAC’s he and his fellow billionaires funded:
“You have no idea of the financial structuring of a lot of these outside groups in terms of how much went to the actual delivery of a message,” Friess said, “versus how many dollars were taken off as fees to the people running them.”
Friess told the Times he’d ideally like a change to campaign finance rules that would allow donors like him to give their big checks directly to candidates.
So basically, Foster Friess wants to legalize the large-scale bribery of political candidates. Got it.
In Nevada, 56-year-old Roxanne Rubin, a Republican, was arrested on Nov. 2 for allegedly trying to vote twice, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. The newspaper quoted a report by an investigator with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office that said Rubin “was unhappy with the process; specifically in that her identification was not checked.”
On Tuesday in New Mexico, a Republican poll watcher was taken into police custody after also apparently trying to test the system. According to the Las Cruces Sun-News, the man voted, then obtained a second provisional ballot and announced he was simply “testing the system to see if people could get away with voting twice.”
Crime doesn’t pay, kids.
Now that we’ve waded through all the muck and filth, it’s time to break out our denial testing kits and determine exactly how much in denial the GOP and their media enablers really are.
My entirely unscientific and unprofessional opinion: entirely.
That is not my opinion alone, however.
In times like these, it’s important to have backup. Enter Charles P. Pierce, who sums up the situation better than I ever could:
The Republicans, of course, are all in a hilarious tizzy about how it all went sour. Was Romney the wrong candidate? (Of course he was. Nominating G.I. Luvmoney four years after his best pals nearly burned down the world was almost as stupid as nominating one of the other clowns in the clown car would have been. Oops. Paradox! Alert! Alert! Arrrrrooooooooogaaaahhh!!) Was the “message” bad? (Of course it was. It’s been bad for 30 years. The country’s just been catching up to how godawful it is. Hint: You’ve lost the official popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections, and the one you “won” has an asterisk the size of Alpha Centauri hung on it.) Was the moon in the seventh house? In my capacity as Gracious Winner, let me suggest an alternative general theory.
You lost because your party has become demented.
Do go on.
The Republican party is a cascade of symptoms right now. And it’s very hard to see a way out of it. It has managed to construct an almost perfect Newtonian hall of mirrors — for each solution, there is within the party an equal, but opposite problem. There is almost no way to function within the party structure as it has been redefined by the various elements of the conservative “movement” without rounding a corner and colliding with the image of itself coming in the other direction.
And thus we reach the crux of the problem.
Let’s pick a few sample issues that are important to different constituencies: gay marriage, immigration reform, climate change, and the economy.
If the GOP moderates on gay marriage to bring in gays and young people, Evangelicals and other social conservatives will lose their goddamn minds. Not only that, but a libertarian position of “Do whatever you want in the sanctity of your own bedroom” doesn’t win them either the gay vote or the youth vote; either you embrace marriage equality with both arms, or you continue to play to the megachurch crowd.
If the GOP moderates on immigration reform to capture Latino votes, the Olds and the Disaffected White People lose their goddamn minds, because they blame all the nations problems on an army of brown folks who have come to take their jobs. The irony is that Rick fucking Perry had the right goddamn idea during the debates, and Mitt Romney and the rest of the field shish-kebabed him live on stage.
If the GOP moderates on climate change to pick up affluent whites, young people, and anyone that isn’t a mouthbreathing dumbfuck, the corporate wing of the party loses their goddamn minds, because they’re all pretty much up to their eyeballs in destroying the planet for profit. It doesn’t matter that cap-and-trade was a conservative idea; an energy policy that doesn’t involve building a gigantic pipeline to pump the dirtiest fuel on the planet across an aquifer that supplies the vast majority of farm country with it’s water is dead on arrival.
That finally brings us to the economy.
Strip away all the anti-science, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant positions, and the Republicans still are wedded to an economic doctrine that’s as nutty as is Ted Cruz’s opinion on the UN plot to steal our golfs. Five years ago, Jonathan Chait — who, by the way, had a great election season — wrote a book called The Big Con, in which he successfully linked the Republican devotion to supply-side economics to all the other wacky positions into which the conservative “movement” has finessed the Republicans. And that, friends, is the real hill on which they are prepared to die.
The proverbial pink and purple polka dotted elephant in the room. And now, for one final thought:
Party discipline is a thing of the past. The things that all these centers of power agree on are, in the main, incredibly unpopular. The ones on which they disagree are self-defeating. If one problem is that the Republicans are afflicted with competing, self-negating orthodoxies, the other problem is that every one of these competing, self-negating orthodoxies has a powerful constituency within the party. There is no point in finding a charismatic Latino candidate if he’s going to alienate women, like Marco Rubio would, or women and scientists, the way “Bobby Jindal” would, or every rational human, the way Ted Cruz would. Every solution is its own problem. Good luck with that.
Welcome to the hall of mirrors.
