Conservative finger-pointing

Cenk Uygur: "There's nothing that makes me happier than rich conservative guys that wanted to buy this election getting robbed. But the people who robbed you weren't the poor or the middle class. It was your own. It was Rove."

That's great, isn't it? And now, Karl Rove is desperately trying to defend himself. I must say, this is my favorite of his excuses:

Rove told Fox that Obama won by “suppressing the vote.” Not by, say, imposing voting restrictions that disproportionately affect certain demographics, but by running mean ads about Bain Capital.

Heh, heh. Yeah, that's it. It's the Democrats, not the Republicans, who conspired to suppress the vote... by saying mean things about the Republican nominee! Oh, god, I think I'm going to bust a gut laughing at these people!

And do you know what's even better than this? After all, win or lose, Karl Rove will still keep the $30 million to $50 million he made off this election. But how about Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate?

Adelson spent millions of dollars trying to defeat Mitt Romney in the Republican primary, at one point pretty much single-handedly keeping Newt Gingrich in the race. He lost. So then he spent more millions supporting the candidate he'd just been spending millions to attack - and lost again! Heh, heh.

Of course, Adelson is a multi-billionaire. He could do the same thing every year without even inconveniencing himself. But at least we can laugh at him. And maybe his pride is hurt, I don't know.

It isn't all fun and games, though. Check out this rather apocalyptic video from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank:



Incredible, isn't it? Scary, too. As hysterical as the right-wing has been, it just seems to be getting worse and worse. Do these seem like people who might be willing to compromise to bring our nation together?

And note that the Heritage Foundation was the guiding light behind the individual mandate in Romneycare Obamacare! Yes, that used to be the Republican position, and they were the people pushing it.

But the right-wing doesn't even recognize itself anymore. They've just gotten crazier and crazier.

TPM suggests that they've backed themselves into a corner in reaction to Barack Obama, when they decided to automatically oppose anything Obama supported, even if it was their own plan. (After all, their #1 priority was to make him a one-term president.)

It’s sort of implicit and maybe half understood. But it’s worth noting out loud that the GOP of today is quite a bit more conservative than it was only four years ago. No, John McCain was not the first choice of the GOP base. But it was also possible to nominate someone who supported immigration reform, who had at least some level of support for climate change legislation. The same could be said on a few other fronts.

The Obama presidency has led the GOP to make verboten a series of policies it either pioneered or which at least some significant segments of the party embraced. So it’s not just that the GOP is living in the ‘past’.

Of course, this is the Republican Party which successfully wooed white racists with their notorious 'Southern strategy' and ended up absorbing all those old Dixiecrats. That seemed to be a brilliant - though disgusting and very, very cynical - political move decades ago, and they've used that success to turn America hard to the right.

But now what?

(Pat Bagley)

The apocalyptic tone in that video, and in the manic hair-pulling by other Republicans, is not a result of the re-election of a moderate Democrat. No, it's from the re-election of a black moderate Democrat - and with the overwhelming support of Hispanics and Asian-Americans, too.

The finger-pointing is fun. The racially-tinged hysteria and apocalyptic rhetoric, not so much. How crazy are these people?

Sane Republicans will recognize that they need to rethink their whole strategy. But how many sane Republicans are there, these days? And can they change their strategy without angering the crazies they've been wooing and inciting for decades?

Obviously, they'll try to pretend to be more welcoming to minorities - especially Hispanics, I suspect. Right now, they're just astonished that their pretense didn't work, but I don't expect them to give that up (although given the feeling in their base about immigration, I wonder how successful that will be).

Unfortunately, I also suspect they'll concentrate harder on dividing minorities, on pitting one group of people against another. They've done that quite successfully in the past, though I'm starting to doubt that it will work so well for them now. (I hope that's not just wishful-thinking.)

But if none of this works, how crazy will they get? They're pretty crazy already, and it's only going to get worse, I suspect. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I guess we'll see.