The GOP just reelected Priebus, and there is not a single Republican who questions the platform. The reason why they lost was only in messaging. It's not that they hold reprehensible positions on abortion when it comes to rape, which they do, it's just that they talked about them wrong. It's not that they hold reprehensible positions on poor minorities using the social safety net, which they do, it's just that, even though they've figured out they can't use overtly racist language to talk about it in public, they still haven't gotten the message just right.

LOL check out Paul Ryan's speech from the NRI:
Emphasis mine. How do you complain about the dire consequences of Obama saving Medicare money in a paragraph you start by whining about entitlements? It's word salad

But Paul Ryan is SERIOUS ABOUT THE DEBT

Oh this one is full of gems:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...757.html?hp=r4

LOL he's upset he's not getting enough credit for his tokenism

Wookie,

Your clever title change not quite up to par. Proof: the total lack of row upon row of eyerolls ITT. Try something fiercer. "The Tragic Death of TEAM IKESTOYS LOLOLOL" might do it.

Keep in mind guys that those quotes aren't from random bat**** insane state congressmen from Arizona or South Carolina. They are from Paul Ryan, VP candidate and face of the party's fiscal agenda, and from the freaking RNC chairman. As I've been trying to tell you, the intense denial and lack of awareness goes all the way to the top, and it isn't getting better.

LOL Priebus.

Those super-sound most conservative evar policies that don't need to be touched aren't detached from the crazy quotes. If you're trying to find ways to justify forcing a raped woman to bear the child of her attacker, it's absolutely inevitable that somebody's going to "slip up" and say something super ridiculous.

Maybe the GOP just doesn't want to win. They are much better off as the 'complainers' when they are out of power. Hard to bitch about how much the government sucks when you're the ones running it.

If a large amount of the evangelical base does a religious belief backflip on the issue I would be shocked. A big mistake of mixing politics and religion is getting stuck holding absolute positions, when flexibility is required.

What are they going to do, join Obama in having a change of heart on the issue of gay marriage and invalidate their own belief in the inerrancy of the literal bible? Color me very impressed if anything like that happens.

They will do that in a heart beat as soon as it becomes politically advantageous to do so. And it will, because nobody who's young cares who you ****.

Edit: Oops I thought you meant the GOP would backflip, not the evangelical base. The evangelicals will probably just have to die off. The GOP will leave them in the dust as soon as it becomes obvious (to the GOP, not to the rest of us!) they are the reason for the crazy policies that are making them lose.

They also re-elected Bachmann

The GOP doesn't believe in any 'ism.' Isms were eradicated in the 60s. Everyone is on equal ground and meritocracy is alive and well in the USA.

b

Polling where America has gotten more religious over the last 50ish years would tend to indicate that the evangelical base doesnt have a single generation lifespan and that parasite is getting buried in deep. They are generally outbreeding the rest of the white segments of American society and they are passing along stronger and stronger religious convictions. Either the base fragments entirely and a third party is created or they need to find a new paradigm for how they are going to exist as a single entity while expecting to win the White House, the Senate is probably off limits too, and they are pretty screwed if the Dems find a way to un-gerrymander the House.

I disagree completely. In our little corner of the country, there isn't a single GOP member who seriously runs on anything relating to social issues. The GOP will have no problem leaving the super-religious behind. They will just take queues from the more 'enlightened' areas of the country and swarm to those positions.

The religious may be getting more religious, but there are far less of them as part of the voting population. The internet breaks down a lot of the fear/unknown dealing with issues, and the younger generations aren't interested in superstitions when they can see reality in front of their faces. It's a lot easier to 'hate gays' when you aren't friends with 3 of them on Facebook.

What we've seen from the so-called Conservative Media, some of whose major players (Beck, Limbaugh) were recently exposed as having taken "pay for say" money, that is getting paid to launch talking points, is basically Chomsky 101, the Chomsky playbook essentially.

Meanwhile, "Republicans" or "conservatives" have been mindlessly branded like sports fans of a particular team, literally cheering for the color Red, and getting a vicarious lock-yourself-in-your-room-and-turn-up-the-rock-music-super-loud-because-your-mom-doesn't-understand-you kind of rush or aggression release when rock star commentators like Savage, Nugent, Rush and Beck run off the rails and literally scream the rudest and most incendiary and F-you things into the microphone they can think of. Literally the "punk rockers" of modern American politics, selling a head banging stuck in traffic caffeine high to the hordes of non-college educated stuck in a crap job American males. Just check out the names: Greg "Gutfeld," like "Gut-felt" or "Gut-feeling." Michael "Savage." Of course he is some old fart in his seventies, but when he is screaming on the radio he is like the second coming of Darby Crash or something--ironically always bringing his righteous indignation back around to the necessity of traditional judaeo-christian beliefs and values, as if that wasn't already incoherent enough.

Part of what is worrisome is for instance how they responded to the Romney defeat: they immediately said they should have messaged differently.

What was TRANSPARENTLY clear during the Romney/Ryan fiasco was that A. both Romney and Ryan were lying their butts off and were willing to say absolutely anything to get elected and B. nothing that Romney or Ryan said had any bearing whatsoever on what they might actually do if elected. Their whole campaign was an overt trick, a lie that was infuriatingly coddled by the mainstream media, who neither definitively crushed it for its inconsistency and untruthfulness, or took it at literal and complete face value and forced it back upon them with all its logical conclusions.

What could (very easily) happen in the next couple election cycles is that the Republicans simply find a candidate, a man (or woman) with cool hair and charisma, who "resonates" with people and has a high likability factor. Then a savvy campaign team comes in and creates good targeted non-controversial messaging etc.

He (or she) gets elected, and then does the exact same thing that Rick Santorum or any of the "rape" Senators would do--roll back Obamacare, roll back Wall street regulation, roll back election reform, start a 10 year war with Iran, bring back torture, bring back daily terror alerts, double down on Patriot act, defund the ATF, etc.

Like, no matter what progress Democrats make in government the next 4, 8, or 12 years, all it takes is one unscrupulous Republican with cool hair to come in and trash everything and run up a gigantic deficit, like Bush did taking Clinton's national SURPLUS and turning it into a deficit that they now call "the great problem of our generation" or whatever--but was all of their own making and totally unnecessary.

That post belongs in 2007 I think.

Well, I assume you mean 2011. But maybe you're referring to Sarah Palin in 2007. And I mean I guess we've all seen Palin's pathetic and absurdist low-rent Joan of Arc syndrome play itself out across American christendom in the past 5 years.

But Romney, clearly, was almost the exact opposite of what they should've nominated. For one thing, he was a mormon, something that can't be underestimated. In fact, I really thought that Ann Coulter's eventual endorsement of Romney essentially broke the fundamentalist grip on the Republican party, and rendered all of their heretofore sacrosanct purity tests laughably irrelevant. This was of course followed by Billy Graham and virtually every high profile conservative figure endorsing Romney as well.

But, even more than "that whole mormon thing" was the fact that Romney, despite the cool hair, was sorely lacking in charisma. He wasn't likable, he was phony, he didn't connect with people, and he constantly wore this tense grimace of fear, anger, loathing and discomfort on his face. I give credit to the Republicans for pushing so hard for him and making it a horse race: in October of 2012 I honestly thought the Republicans should replace Romney if they were serious about winning, because he seemingly had no chance whatsoever of winning, and they must have known that. But they did in fact turn it into a bit of a horse race, by turning Romney into the most blatantly dishonest political candidate in American history, and publicly exposing the entire cynical Rove-Republican playbook in the course of 2 months.

But yeah, get somebody with more charisma, cooler hair, xtian fundamentalist, and a good communicator with empathy and a southern accent (the guy Rick Perry was supposed to be until he was discovered to be an alzheimer or a ****** or whatever he is) and give him a better message (better lies, lies that are less scary and more friendly to women and moderates) and that guy likely wins.

No, I'm saying 2007 because at that point, it could be argued that the Democrats would be better, especially things like:

I agree with you that Bush was terrible, but pretending that the debt problem lies with the Republicans only is laughable. Both parties are perfectly happy spending money when they are in power and complaining about the other party spending money when they aren't.

Your post is also hilarious considering you wrote this:

Which is totally unlike the democrats, who hated civil liberties violations and wars under Bush, but are curiously silent on those issues now..........

The Republicans will win as soon as they abandon the social crazy policies and focus on spending. The current financial trajectory of the country is not sustainable. The only question is when that will happen. Because of the primary process, the crazy republicans get nominated, and the transition will probably be slower than it normally would be. I would personally look for sane GOP members coming from liberal states who have decided issues like gay marriage already.

After all, you can discard the crazy religious people and they will still vote for you. You have them so rabidly anti-democrat that it doesn't even matter what else you do.

I do agree with you about Romney, though. He was the worst of a bad bunch of candidates. Maybe Hunstman would have had a chance if the GOP were sane.

Why doesn't the GOP realize that it's not wise to alienate and offend such a large % of the US population? (At least 47% overtly ffs.) The common answer here would be "they aren't wise ldo", but that seems so simplistic, they can't all be that stupid, so what gives? The GOP would be laughed off the stage in most first world countries, it's kinda mind boggling.

Probably lack of leadership in GOP. We knew who the bosses were in the Gee Dub years.

Because they are a bunch of white racists? I don't really like to say that, but for the majority (notice I didn't say LARGE majority), it's pretty much true.

Listen for a second. When Obama became president, there was multiple articles about white Americans feeling they "lost everything" when a black man became president of the United States. Are you, or anyone you know, felt that they "lost everything"?

I know for a fact I didn't, but many people I know did.

3,2,1 immigration reform

Dont worry the House will block it in hilariously self destrictive fashion