Tea Party Refuses to Accept Blame for GOP Losses

By a number of accounts the so-called Tea Party has roughly an 85% overlap with the Christian Right.  Hence why I often refer to the GOP's new base as Christofascist/Tea Party.  These are the folks that secured the GOP nominations for folks like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Todd Akin in Missouri, etc., and also pushed the GOP to dwell on abortion, contraception, deporting immigrants, slashing social programs, and other issues that drove a majority of voters into the arms of the Democrats and reelected Barack Obama.  To anyone in touch with objective reality one would think that the Christofascist/Tea Party responsibility for the GOP's drubbing would be obvious.  Yet to these delusional loonies, the losses are all the fault of the so-called party establishment.  The good news for Democrats is that these lunatics of the right have no plan to disappear and, if anything, want to assert themselves even more strongly over the GOP's future.  The Washington Times has an article that reviews to alternate universe of the Tea Party crowd.  Here are highlights:

Tea party leaders say they refuse to be the scapegoats for the drubbing Republicans took on Election Day, claiming it was the party establishment — not their insurgent movement — that cost the party seats in the House and Senate and returned President Obama to the White House.

In fact, various branches of the grass-roots movement vow to reassert themselves on the local and nation levels as Congress begins talks aimed at averting the “fiscal cliff.” They say their call for limited government is more relevant than ever before.

“As far as the tea party is concerned, we are still here,” said Amy Kremer, leader of the Tea Party Express. “We may not be out on the streets with the colorful signs like 2010, but we are here, we are engaged and we are going to continue to fight. We never thought this was a short-term process. It is going to take a long time to turn it around.”

Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation, said the tea party’s first order of business is to rebut Republicans who want to blame the movement for their poor performance at the ballot box.

“They went well out of their way to ignore us, marginalize us and pretend we did not exist, and they gave us the most liberal nominee in the history of the Republican Party,” Mr. Phillips said, taking particular aim at Karl Rove, the mastermind behind former President George W. Bush’s career and founder of American Crossroads, a super PAC that spent more than $100 million in the campaign but had few successes to show for it.

The election this year proved to be more of a mixed bag for candidates supported by the tea party.  Rep. Michele Bachmann [barely] won another term in office, and voters pushed Sen.-elect Ted Cruz to victory in Texas. But those wins were offset by some high-profile flops in conservative states carried by presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Richard Mourdock blasted onto the political scene after knocking off six-term Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Utah in the GOP primary. But Mr. Mourdock lost in the general election after saying that when a rape results in a pregnancy “it is something that God intended to happen.”.

Republicans also saw another pickup slip away when Sen. Claire McCaskill fended off Rep. W. Todd Akin, who said the female body has ways of rejecting pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape.”

In the lower chamber, tea party casualties included Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois and Rep. Nan A.S. Hayworth of New York. Things got worse this week when Rep. Allen B. West, Florida Republican, conceded that he lost his bid for re-election to his Democratic challenger, Patrick Murphy.

Tea partyers said establishment candidates also fared poorly in the elections, pointing to the losses of George Allen in Virginia, Connie Mack in Florida, Tommy G. Thompson in Wisconsin and Scott P. Brown in Massachusetts.

The irony is that each of the "establishment candidates" that lost embraced the agenda of the Christofascists/Tea Party, George Allen being a prime example of this phenomenon.  In doing so, he alienated women, minorities, the nones, and gays.  Yet the Kool-Aid drinkers still refuse to admit their role in leading the GOP to defeat.   It will be entertaining watching them trying to drag the GOP to further political oblivion.