Absentee Ballots May Cement Democrat Upset in Pennsylvania

At times I have to think Republicans are living in a bubble or alternate universe - just like the Christofascists who make up a key element of their party's base.  They ignore reliable and mostly fact based news outlets preferring propaganda TV on Fox News and similar outlets that tell them only what they want to hear and play up to their worse prejudices, even fanning hatred at times.  They also continue to ignore the reality that less than 30% of registered voters supported Trump in 2016.  A huge portion of voters stayed home seemingly disliking both main party candidates.  That they stayed home in November, 2016, doesn't mean they will always stay home on election day or that they aren't finding the Trump//Pence regime to be nothing short of repulsive.  Republicans in Congress and down the ballot may be willing to sell their souls for short term gain, but it increasingly appears that the majority of Americans have not thrown away concern for decency and/or a longing for proper behavior by the occupant of the White House.  Thus, at the moment, Conor Lamb, a Democrat remains in the lead in Pennsylvania's 18th District where Trump won by 20 points in 2016.  Lamb's lead may well be cemented by absentee ballots which skew towards Democrat leaning Alleghany County.   A column in the New York Times underscores why Republicans ought to be very worried even if their candidate some how squeaks out a win.  Here are highlights:

It’s hard to imagine a candidate with friendlier looks, a more harmless demeanor and a gentler-sounding surname than Conor Lamb.

It’s hard to imagine a message for the G.O.P. scarier than the one that Lamb, a Democrat, just delivered in a special House election in Pennsylvania’s 18th district, where he led his Republican opponent, Rick Saccone, by less than 1,000 votes in a race that remained too close to call on Wednesday morning.

Lamb declared victory. But even if he somehow ends up losing, Democrats have reason to rejoice and Republicans to tremble. Just 16 months ago, Donald Trump won this district by 20 points, and its promise as the kind of place brimming with the sort of voters who thrill to him was confirmed by his visit there late last week for a rally in support of Saccone. [Trump] The president put what popularity he retains on the line, and flexed his trademark schoolyard humor with the epithet “Lamb the Sham.” This is all that he has to show for it.

Politically and ideologically, Saccone glued himself to Trump, running a campaign whose slogan might as well have been, “I’m With Him.” Outside Republican groups poured millions into the race, some of it for ads that touted the very tax cuts that are supposed to buoy their hopes to hold onto their House majority in the November midterms.

So Lamb’s showing — win, lose or draw — is remarkable, and it’s of a piece with the victory of Doug Jones, a Democrat, in a special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama and with what happened last November in Virginia, where Democrats prevailed decisively in the gubernatorial race and picked up a large number of seats in the state’s House of Delegates. Clearly, the opposition to Trump is energized and organized. In the upcoming hours and days, you will hear otherwise. Republican leaders will spin like mad. They’ll make the case that what happened in Pennsylvania was peculiar to Pennsylvania and that there are few omens to be seen in it or lessons to be gleaned. They commenced that effort even before the voting in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, spooked by late polls that suggested serious trouble for Saccone, 60. . . . . They bemoaned everything about him down to his mustache. They noted that Lamb, 33, a handsome (and clean-shaven) military veteran, was straight from central casting . . . . “When your message is simply I am for new leadership and cleaning up Washington, and you look like you just walked out of an Orvis catalog, you are going to connect with voters on both sides of the aisle,” wrote Saleno Zito in the Washington Examiner late last week.

[M]any of the Democrats who will vie to unseat Republican incumbents in House races in November won’t be able to follow Lamb’s playbook. To get through their party’s primaries, they’ll have to stake out more progressive ground than he did, and adopt a more combative, fiery tone. That could undercut their chances of replicating his success.

Indeed, Democrats’ euphoria over how he fared on Tuesday will give way to sharp internal tensions and sustained quarreling over which sorts of candidates — soft-spoken or bold, centrist or liberal, eclectic or pure — the party would be wisest, from a pragmatic standpoint, to promote.

But if the Pennsylvania results put Democrats in an awkward position, they leave Republicans in an even worse place. What exactly is their best strategy for the midterms? Sending President Trump into districts that supposedly smile on him isn’t looking like such a hot proposition. The mantra of “tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts” is obviously no panacea.

And with each passing week — each passing day — the Trump administration’s turbulence intensifies and the scandals and scandal-ettes pile up. Yes, it’s a long way from now until November, and much about the national mood and the playing field can change. But in that yawning stretch of time, Trump can also render himself and his enablers even less attractive. I have faith.

To me, Democrats need to cease internal squabbles and avoid the bullshit like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders sought to inject into the Democrat primary in Virginia.  Thankfully, their effort failed and a far better candidate won the primary.  The same thing needs to happen in districts across America where the real goal should be to defeat Republicans everywhere possible.  Democrats also need to take a lesson from Ralph Northam and Conor Lamb's playbook:  the ground game and turn out the vote effort means EVERYTHING. 

Conservative Fantasies, Collide With Reality

Two pathological liars

As often is the case, in a New York Times column, Paul Krugman cuts to the core of the Republican Party's dysfunction: its core base lives in a fantasy world, as do so many of its elected officials.  Thanks to "news" outlets like Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, Breitbart, Drudge Report and a host of similar propaganda mills, the party base remains in a bubble and rails against government even as the morons of the base fail to grasp that their own reliance on Social Security, Medicare and a host of other programs constitutes reliance on government programs and what they condemn as handouts if benefits go to anyone else - especially those with darker skin color. The irony is especially stunning with older white voters who suck up Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid benefits like pigs at a trough.  And don't get me going on welfare benefits that are used by whites more than any other group in red states. The willful ignorance is dumbfounding.  Here are column highlights:

This week the Trump administration put out a budget blueprint — or more accurately, a “budget” blueprint. After all, real budgets detail where the money comes from and where it goes; this proclamation covers only around a third of federal spending, while saying nothing about revenues or projected deficits.

As the fiscal expert Stan Collender put it: “This is not a budget. It’s a Trump campaign press release masquerading as a government document.”

So what’s the point of the document? The administration presumably hopes that it will distract the public and the press from the ongoing debacle over health care. But it probably won’t. And in any case, this pseudo-budget embodies the same combination of meanspiritedness and fiscal fantasy that has turned the Republican effort to replace Obamacare into a train wreck.

In this vision, much if not most government spending is a complete waste, doing nobody any good. The same is true of government regulations. And to the extent to which spending does help anyone, it’s Those People — lazy, undeserving types who just so happen to be a bit, well, darker than Real Americans.

This was the kind of thinking — or, perhaps, “thinking” — that underlay President Trump’s promise to replace Obamacare with something “far less expensive and far better.” . . . . however, Republicans turn out to have no ideas about how to make the program cheaper other than eliminating health insurance for 24 million people (and making coverage worse, with higher out-of-pocket spending, for those who remain).

And basically the same story applies at a broader level. Consider federal spending as a whole: Outside defense it’s dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — all programs that are crucial to tens of millions of Americans, many of them the white working-class voters who are the core of Trump support.

Given this reality, why are so many people opposed to “big government”?

Many have a distorted view of the numbers. . . . . Many also fail to connect their personal experience with public policy: Large numbers of Social Security and Medicare recipients believe that they make no use of any government social program. . . . politicians can often get away with running on promises of drastic spending cuts: Many, perhaps most voters don’t see how such cuts would affect their lives.

But what will happen if anti-big-government politicians find themselves in a position to put their agenda into practice? Voters will quickly get a lesson in what slashing spending really means — and they won’t be happy.

[T]he reality is that the proposed cuts would have ugly, highly visible effects. Zeroing out the Community Development Block Grant program may sound good if you have no idea what it does (which Mr. Trump surely doesn’t); eliminating Meals on Wheels, an immediate consequence, not so much. Nor would coal country, which voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, like the consequences if he eliminates the Appalachian Regional Commission. 

Wait, there’s more. Effectively disemboweling the Environmental Protection Agency may sound smart if you imagine that it’s just a bunch of meddling bureaucrats. But the public wants stronger, not weaker, environmental protection, and would not be pleased to see a sharp deterioration in air and water quality.

The point is that Mr. Trump’s attempt to change the subject away from his party’s health care quagmire isn’t going to work, and not just because this supposed budget literally isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. At a more fundamental level, it doesn’t even change the subject.

 As a one time Republican activist, the party has sadly become a gathering of ignoramuses, racists, religious extremists and misogynists.  My Republican ancestors would be embarrassed to be affiliated with such people, many of who my southern belle grandmother would have viewed as "white trash.".

The Right Wing Media Swamp is Killing the GOP

It is not just the base of the Republican Party that is hastening the demise of the party.  Aiding and abetting the ugliness and overall misogyny of the GOP is the right wing media swamp - or perhaps toxic bubble is a better term - that churns out lies and misinformation and helps maintain the fantasy world that so many in the GOP seem to live in.  When one lives in a world where most of the "news" one hears comes from right wing outlets sooner or later (i) you become detached from objective reality, and (ii) have bigoted and ignorant views/beliefs reinforced.  Should Donald Trump lose  - and hopefully, lose badly - on November 8th, any effort to reform the GOP and make it competitive again in presidential elections must address the disservice done by the right wing media that is playing to a shrinking audience even as it pretends to represent the dominant view.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the problem.  Here are highlights:

No doubt, should this expected defeat [of Donald Trump] come to pass, Republican leadership will try to regroup and figure out what went wrong.

As in the last “autopsy,” the GOP establishment will probably conclude that it needs to broaden its appeal to demographics beyond older white men; that what prevented this more widespread appeal in 2016 was having a boorish, sexist, race-baiting, egomaniacal, undisciplined nominee; that if only it fielded a more genteel version of Trump, someone who espoused essentially the same fiscal and social policies but with more empathy, they’d have won the White House, and will win it once again.

This conclusion would be wrong.

The sickness in today’s Republican Party is not confined to its current standard-bearer. It is therefore not curable by merely disavowing, however belatedly, the soon-to-be-defeated nominee. The sickness has taken over the Republican base, and there’s only one antidote.

If Republicans truly want to save the Republican Party, they need to go to war with right-wing media. That is, they need to dismantle the media machine persuading their base to believe completely bonkers, bigoted garbage.

It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and Internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess, that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters. And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it.

For a sense of just how misinformed Republican voters have become, consider a few of the provably wrong things many believe.

Seven in 10 Republicans either doubt or completely disbelieve that President Obama was born in the United States. Six in 10 think he’s a secret Muslim. Half believe global warming is possibly or definitely a myth concocted by scientists.

Among just Trump voters, 7 in 10 believe government economic data are fabricated.

Republicans and Trump backers didn’t come to these conclusions independently. They learned them from the influential TV, radio and Web outfits whose imprimaturs Republican politicians desperately seek, and whose more troubling content these politicians have been reluctant to criticize.

When it comes to the paranoid, destructive excesses of right-wing media — not just Fox News’s headliners such as Sean Hannity, but also Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones — Republican leaders have been somewhat more reluctant to condemn or even gently critique.

That’s presumably because many of the crazy conspiracy theories circulated by these outlets served the party’s political interests. At least in the short term.

Birtherism, which Republican leaders were painfully slow to renounce, helped delegitimize the popular mandate of our first black president, even as it legitimized widespread racial resentment.

Trump is not some black swan, whose unique cocktail of charisma, telegenicism and political fluidity landed him the nomination. His nomination is the product of years of race-baiting, conspiracy-theorizing,expert-delegitimizing right-wing media nonsense, which Republican politicians aided and abetted because it seemed politically expedient at the time. They helped the alt-right create the alternate reality that made a Trump nomination inevitable.

And unless the party establishment grapples with its own complicity in misinforming, misleading and frightening the masses, it’s doomed to field more Donald Trumps in the future.

How the Conservative Media Created the Monstrosity that is Donald Trump

In follow to the last post in which Michael Gerson laments what has become of the GOP as personified by Donald Trump - and I would argue in Ted Cruz as well - a piece in Salon looks at the role that the so-called "conservative media" has played in the descent of the GOP into religious extremism and open racism.  Leading the way is Fox News - Faux News at this blog - and the various hate merchants that have found platforms in the conservative media.  The GOP establishment once loved these outlets.  Now they have turned on mainstream Republicans like a rabid dog.  Here are  highlights:

Pundits have spent a lot of time analyzing the Trump phenomenon. For the most part, Trump is considered an anomaly, a product of a uniquely hostile political climate. He’s also a massive celebrity with a powerful brand and a talent for self-promotion, and that goes a long way in our media culture.

Trump’s success as an anti-establishment candidate has raised a lot of questions about the ability of party elites to dictate the nomination process. Party leaders – particularly in the GOP – have traditionally decided who the nominees would be, but that’s clearly changed.

In the case of Trump, the question is whether he’s just an outlier or an inevitable byproduct of systemic changes in our political system. If it’s the latter, then we can expect to see more Trump-like candidates in the future; that is to say, more celebrities masquerading as serious candidates (à la Sarah Palin and Herman Cain).

Trump’s uniqueness as a candidate means it’s a “mistake to assume his campaign signals systemic changes in the process.” Trump may not be an ideologue (he’s too vacuous for that), but there’s no question he’s benefited from partisan media and an ideologically charged climate.

Trump is an unintended product of Fox News, but a product nonetheless. Trump only exists because his supporters live in a fact-free bubble that has been engineered by conservative media. And while conservative media clearly favors the Republican Party, ultimately it’s driven by the profit motive, not partisan loyalties.

In a column for FiveThirtyEight.com this week, Anna Pluta asks why Trump’s relentless bullshitting hasn’t hurt his campaign. Pluta writes:

“Donald Trump has a consistently loose relationship with the truth…Politifact rolled his numerous misstatements into one big ‘lie of the year.’ But all the fact-checking in the world hasn’t pushed Trump toward a more evidence-based campaign, and his support has held steady or even increased in the some polls. What explains Trump’s ability to seemingly overcome conventional political wisdom?”

Trump’s “supporters have shown signs of being misinformed. Political science research has shown that the behavior of misinformed citizens is different from those who are uninformed, and this difference may explain Trump’s unusual staying power.” Misinformed means voters are fed erroneous information in order to flatter their biases and concretize their beliefs. Consequently, “misinformed citizens tend to be the most confident in their views.”

We know that people who get their information from Fox News are exceptionally misinformed, and that’s because Fox News cares about ratings, not the facts. And Fox has helped create an entire conservative media ecosystem that spins false narratives, fuels resentment, and cultivates an indifference to truth. All of this has shaped the conservative base in the last 15 years or so.

Donald Trump only exists because of this ecosystem, and to the extent that that’s true, Fox News and partisan media are responsible for him. The people at Fox News may not like the Frankenstein they’ve created, but that doesn’t make them any less accountable.

Ex-Reagan Official: Fox News is Brainwashing Republicans into a Fringe Group

Fox News - or Faux News as I call it on this blog - is first and foremost a propaganda machine that seemingly thrives in a universe detached from objective reality and which is moving the GOP towards becoming a lunatic fringe group.  Or so says economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  Candidly, I agree with his assessment and continue to believe that the GOP is headed toward long term oblivion unless and until it throws off control of the Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at Bartlett's assessment.  Here are highlights:

Economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warned over the weekend that Fox News had damaged the Republican Party by creating a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves.

In his paper “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics” published earlier this month, Bartlett theorized that watching the network was essentially “self-brainwashing” for viewers, making them believe that the United States was a more conservative nation than it actually was. And so the Republican Party had responded by running radical conservatives that representative Fox News viewers, but not the true state of the electorate.

“Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people,” Bartlett told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily.”

“And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing.” 

Bartlett asserted that it was a bigger problem for conservatives than liberals because they did not have their own network for a long time, and then they “drank very heavily from the Fox waters.”

Sadly, some of my once upon a time Republican colleagues fit within Bartlett's description and have become so brainwashed that it is impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.  Ironically, they claim that I am the one who has been brainwashed when, in fact, they need to look in the mirror at themselves.  Yes Karen, I am talking about you!!

Iran Letter Blowback Startles GOP

I've noted before that today's GOP base and its political whores in Congress live in a bubble and never venture out into venues where voters and citizens have not been swilling Kool-Aid by the bucket full.   When, on rare occasions, they do venture out of the bubble, they seem stunned by the fact that most people do not believe the myths, fairy tales, and propaganda so popular among the knuckle dragging, Kool-Aid drinking party base.  Hence, the shock and surprise among the cretins and political whores who signed Tom Cotton's seditious letter to Iran.  A piece in Politico looks at the bewilderment experienced by the modern day GOP traitors/secessionists.  Here are excerpts:

Some Republican senators admitted Wednesday they were caught off guard by the backlash to a letter warning Iranian leaders against a nuclear agreement with President Barack Obama. And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Republicans — many of whom blessed the missive during a brisk signing session at a Senate lunch a week ago, as senators prepared to flee a Washington snowstorm — should have given it closer consideration.

On this at least, Democrats and Republicans found agreement.  “I find it hard to believe that they understood the severity of what they were doing,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.).

Though none of the 47 Republican signers has expressed regret for co-signing it, the missive, authored by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, is creating unexpected fallout in Congress. And it threatens to linger politically and legislatively.

Sensing a public relations advantage, the campaign arm for Senate Democrats on Wednesday quickly circulated newspaper op-eds criticizing Republicans who signed the missive, and strategists said the issue will soon show up in TV ads in states of vulnerable senators. Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took to the Senate floor for a second time to blast Republican “gimmicks” on Iran and Secretary of State John Kerry called it a “stunning” breach of protocol after being teed up by a question from a Democratic senator at a committee hearing.

On the legislative front, a fragile bipartisan coalition of Iran hawks, who had been approaching a veto-proof majority for legislation that could potentially scuttle any U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement, was showing signs of cracking, as some centrist senators warned they were close to backing away from the measure.

[T]here appeared to be little hope of turning back the clock on the politicization elicited by the letter, and multiple Democratic strategists predicted there would be more political repercussions to come for Republicans. One said there’s “no question” that Democrats will run ads attacking Republicans who signed onto the letter.

Message to Senate Republicans: get your heads out of your asses, stop drinking the Kool-Aid and stop listening to Christofascists and white supremacists. 

Marco Rubio and the GOP Zombies

In previous posts this blog has noted the absence of any change in message of the Republican Party evidenced by Marco Rubio's less than inspiring GOP response to President Obama's State of the Union address.  The GOP continues to believe that all it has to change is the face of the messenger and the "tone" of the message.  Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times that looks further at the zombie like state of today's Republican Party and its refusal to face the reality that it was the GOP's polices that lead to the 2008 economic meltdown.  When one refuses to accept reality, one is doomed to repeat past insanities.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he G.O.P. reply, delivered by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, was both interesting and revelatory. And I mean that in the worst way. For Mr. Rubio is a rising star, to such an extent that Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him “The Republican Savior.” What we learned Tuesday, however, was that zombie economic ideas have eaten his brain. 

In case you’re wondering, a zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both. The classic zombie idea in U.S. political discourse is the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves, but there are many more. And, as I said, when it comes to economics it appears that Mr. Rubio’s mind is zombie-infested. 

Start with the big question: How did we get into the mess we’re in?   The financial crisis of 2008 and its painful aftermath, which we’re still dealing with, were a huge slap in the face for free-market fundamentalists. Circa 2005, the usual suspects — conservative publications, analysts at right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and so on — insisted that deregulated financial markets were doing just fine, and dismissed warnings about a housing bubble as liberal whining. Then the nonexistent bubble burst, and the financial system proved dangerously fragile; only huge government bailouts prevented a total collapse. 

Instead of learning from this experience, however, many on the right have chosen to rewrite history. Back then, they thought things were great, and their only complaint was that the government was getting in the way of even more mortgage lending; now they claim that government policies, somehow dictated by liberals even though the G.O.P. controlled both Congress and the White House, were promoting excessive borrowing and causing all the problems. 

What about responding to the crisis? Four years ago, right-wing economic analysts insisted that deficit spending would destroy jobs, because government borrowing would divert funds that would otherwise have gone into business investment, and also insisted that this borrowing would send interest rates soaring. The right thing, they claimed, was to balance the budget, even in a depressed economy. 

Now, this argument was obviously fallacious from the beginning. As people like me tried to point out, the whole reason our economy was depressed was that businesses weren’t willing to invest as much as consumers were trying to save. So government borrowing would not, in fact, drive up interest rates — and trying to balance the budget would simply deepen the depression.

[M]ore than five years into the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, and one of our two great political parties has seen its economic doctrine crash and burn twice: first in the run-up to crisis, then again in the aftermath. Yet that party has learned nothing; it apparently believes that all will be well if it just keeps repeating the old slogans, but louder.  It’s a disturbing picture, and one that bodes ill for our nation’s future.

Majority of Voters Blame GOP for "Fiscal Cliff"

Despite last week's bitch lap from voters to the GOP, the Republican House continues to play to the delusional GOP base and seems to be seriously considering more obstructionism and refusal to make a deal with the Democrats and White House to solve the nation's budget deficit problem.  Thankfully, a new Pew poll indicates that a majority of voters outside the GOP bubble know precisely who is to blame for the impasse and it's not Obama and/or the Democrats.  CNN looks at the survey results and one would think that if there were any rational adults left in the Republican Party they'd pull their heads out of their asses.  But again, that would assume there are any rational adults left in the GOP, a very dangerous assumption.  Here are story highlights:

While Republicans and Democrats have expressed confidence in their ability to negotiate a deal to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff," a new poll released Tuesday indicates the public is wary about lawmakers' ability to reach a common ground on the nation's budget.

If the two sides fail to find common ground on reducing the deficit, 53% said congressional Republicans will be to blame while 29% said the responsibility falls on President Barack Obama.

If a budget deal is not met and the U.S. economy is left to roll off the impending fiscal cliff, 85% of Democrats and 52% of independents said Republicans will be to blame while 68% of Republicans said the responsibility falls on the president.

I find it increasingly difficult to imagine what it must be like living in the alternate universe of the GOP base where white is black, up is down, and lies are truth.  

David Frum to the GOP: Come Out of the Cocoon and Get a Reality Check

David Frum fell out of the good graces of the Tea Party and Christofacists some time ago.  Why?  Because he refused to drink their Kool-Aid and get his world view solely from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others who effectively create a cocoon that insulates far too many Republicans from the real world - including some that I got to know years ago when I was active in the GOP and served on the GOP City Committee for Virginia Beach.  In a column on CNN, Frum basically bitch slaps conservatives who claim that America is on the road to socialism.  His piece dovetails well with a piece on Politico that looks at the world view cocoon inhabited by far too many in the GOP - people like Ms. Cox in Tennessee that this blog looked at earlier today.  First highlights from David Frum's piece:

The mood among American conservatives is now one of apocalyptic despair.  Having convinced themselves that this election arrayed freedom against tyranny, they now must wonder: Did their country just democratically vote in favor of tyranny?

On Fox News election night, BIll O'Reilly explained the meaning of the election: the "white establishment" was now outnumbered by minorities. "The demographic are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore." And these untraditional Americans "want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it."

 O'Reilly's analysis is echoed across the conservative blogosphere. The (non-white) takers now outnumber the (white) makers. They will use their majority to pillage the makers and redistribute to the takers. In the process, they will destroy the sources of the country's wealth and end the American experiment forever.

President Barack Obama was not re-elected by people who want to "take." The president was re-elected by people who want to work -- and who were convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the president's policies were more likely to create work than were the policies advocated by my party.

The United States did not vote for socialism. It could not do so, because neither party offers socialism. Both parties champion a free enterprise economy cushioned by a certain amount of social insurance. The Democrats (mostly) want more social insurance, the Republicans want less. 

Even if you look only at the experiences of white heterosexual men, the United States of 2012 is a freer country in almost every way than the United States of 1962.

The Republican challenge next is to reassemble a new coalition for limited government and private enterprise. That coalition must include Americans of all ethnicities. To assume from the start that only certain ethnicities will contribute, and that others aspire only to grab, is not only ugly prejudice; it is also self-destructive delusion.

People of all backgrounds want to create, save and contribute to society. A party of the center-right should make them all feel at home, regardless of how they pronounce their last name, the complexion of their skin or the way in which they express love and build family.

Will the Republicans listen to Frum's sound advice?  Personally, I'm not holding my breath. At least not as long as rank and file members of the GOP get their "news" from Fox News and the far right media noise machine.  Here are highlights from Politico on this problem:

A long-simmering generational battle in the conservative movement is boiling over after last week’s shellacking, with younger operatives and ideologues going public with calls that Republicans break free from a political-media cocoon that has become intellectually suffocating and self-defeating.

GOP officials have chalked up their electoral thumping to everything from the country’s changing demographics to an ill-timed hurricane and failed voter turn-out system, but a cadre of Republicans under 50 believes the party’s problem is even more fundamental.

Now, many young Republicans worry, they are the ones in the hermetically sealed bubble — except it’s not confined to geography but rather a self-selected media universe in which only their own views are reinforced and an alternate reality is reflected.

Hence the initial denial and subsequent shock on the right that the country would not only reelect President Barack Obama — but do so with 332 electoral votes.

What worries Republicans, though, is that their Kaelism may be harder to overcome in the short term.

“Unfortunately, for us Republicans who want to rebuild this party, the echo chamber [now] is louder and more difficult to overcome,” said Grayson.

[S]ince President Bush’s second term went south, Republicans have been effectively without a leader. And into that vacuum has stepped a series of conservative figures whose incentives in most cases are not to win votes but to make money and score ratings by being provocative and even outlandish.

“Their bottom line is their main goal, but that doesn’t mean they’re serving the population that buys their books,” said Domenech.  And this, say next-generation Republicans, is where cocoonism has been detrimental to the cause.

And the entertainers’ power isn’t just with gullible grass-roots activists who are likely to believe whatever nefarious rumor about Obama is forwarded to them in an e-mail chain — it’s with donors, too.

There is a good deal more that's worth a read, but the message is clear: stop listening to demagogues and the Rush Limbaughs of the right and find out what the rest of America is actually thinking.  It may make me want to pull my hair out at times, but every day I check out some of the far right "news" sites.  One can only craft their plan when they know what the opponents are actually doing as opposed delusion statements by wind bags and blow hards.