"May The Best Man Win" (Only In Your Lucid Dreams,...)

Republicans weren't beaten only by arithmetic this time. 

They lost through willful blindness.

-- Sandy Banks (great name) echoing my thoughts throughout the last year, in an aptly-titled column, "Reality crashes the Republican Party"

Despite all the public recriminations, I see no sign the Right has learned anything. Instapundit is still ideologically rolling along, as though nothing significant happened, and Ann Althouse is still in full-on conspiracy theory mode, about Benghazi - let nutjobs ring. Straight from the horse's mouth:

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I think chasing conspiracies are counterproductive. But I know our side, and where this is going to lead. The calls that this is all part of the cover-up, that Petraeus didn’t really cheat on his wife, this was all a calculated way of driving him out in order to keep him from making Obama look bad, all the nefarious reasons why this happened now and in this way, are going to spin this story in a very unhealthy direction. And that will be tragic. 

What happened in Benghazi is not, and should not be able to be turned into the equivalence of birtherism and trutherism.

May The Force be with you. 

First, you've got to convince these insulated and well-paid losers they're wrong - which, as we've just seen, even a devastating loss can't do. 

So good luck with that!

How wrong were they? 

Hot Air's "witchcraft" polling coverage speaks volumes about the Right's whole enterprise:

The one thing that is no longer in question is that we need to stop trying to read sinister motives into the professional pollsters and poll analysts and see what might be gained from the product that they’re putting out there. And since we’re on the subject of bad news, it’s also worth asking.. which pollsters were the most accurate, though most of them did pretty well? It was PPP. Gallup and Rasmussen – who we quote here frequently – came in tied for 24th.

Ouch! Gallup and Rasmussen were the polls Ann Althouse threw out most often as well. Sigh. It's so sad to see your friends lose it - and acting so superior as they do so. (I wonder if Ann will be doing any defiantly "fun" posts, now that the premature party's over?) It's just - well, Mark Levin said it, but, if you ask me, he didn't cast his net far enough:

“You know, I’ve always known this but I’m coming to the conclusion yet again, that Republican leaders are really stupid people. And I’m coming to the conclusion that there are an awful lot of stupid people posing as commentators on cable TV,…What a bunch of self-defeating morons.”

"Self-defeating morons." Leave it to Mark Levin, another Bugs Bunny to mediocrity, to give it to 'em rough. Is there a black one out there? On the conservative side? Could there be?

Could that even be allowed?

I remember folks repeatedly saying "Be Humble" in the face of the facts they were "willfully" ignoring, as though their control over online word choice (and that's all it is) is more important than the facts themselves. Nice dodge, and very NewAge behavior. ("Be Humble"? What is this, an ashram?)

They never had to deal with being wrong as long as other's behavior modification was the issue. 

Walk away. They didn't care. They're wrong, but they're together.

And now, their world is sliding out of their control.

Conor Friedersdorf nails the problem as well:

Musing on Mitt Romney's loss, Jonah Goldberg makes several sensible points and one assertion that bears examining. "I have a different view from some about the coming wave of recriminations: I welcome it. I don't know that things need to be vicious or personal, but they do need to be honest," he writes. "This is one of the great and abiding strengths of the conservative movement and the thing I love about it most. Contrary to the conventional wisdom among liberals, conservatives are actually far more willing to examine their dogma and their first principles than liberals or 'centrists' are. This has been the source of conservatism's lasting strength." 

It's something I've heard him say before. 

My experience is different, Jonah, but let's not debate. Instead, help those of us unfamiliar with these vibrant conversation to find them. If these self-examinations of principle and dogma are a strength of the conservative movement, point us to five examples that are worthy of a wider audience.

When you consider, just the number of blogs out there, somebody's still fooling themselves. The fact is, these guys don't want to deal with anybody who's not like them, and yes - whether racial or not - that can get "vicious or personal." This is, for all intents and purposes, a family argument.

It's been treated, instead, as a mob scene.

Another, more personal, example. 

Gawker has lucid dreamer and  NewAge Assassin Jared Lee Loughner's "dream logs"
and here's one of them:

Now, looking at that - and remembering all the online speculation at the time, "looking for answers in/arguing politics" - is there any wonder why I would write of Reynolds & Co. "Today's Intellectual Class Couldn't Catch A Cold"? And this was a prime example of letting Obama exploit an issue (Oh man, the shit was flying fast and furious then!) because the Right refused to see what was in front of their eyes - and ripe for the picking.

But how could they know? I still read people, to this day, who - understanding the shooting of Gabby Gifford wasn't just (or even mostly) political - say Laughner's merely "a crazy man."

They're right, but they, too, have succumbed to the same madness. (You must look at that link.)

That's the hard one to take - unless, of course, you're sitting on Oprah's couch.
Funny how that works. Tell me:

What's the difference between the trade-off Loughner was making, with his values, and what just occurred between the Right and Romney?

Very little that I can see.

But then, unlike them, I'm in what Ann Althouse called the "ugly" business of getting it right,...