They'll Be Important Whenever They Start Acting Like It

I had a funny moment with a friend a few days ago, when he was trying to describe CPAC and I pretended not to know what he was mentally grasping for. I kind of feel like doing it again, now, after reading Allahpundit's musings on CPAC and the last election:

Obama won in 2008 because the public was exhausted with Bush and he represented something wholly fresh and new. He synthesized a particular political and cultural moment uniquely in my memory of presidential campaigns. (I don’t remember Reagan ’80.) A more conservative, or merely more capable, candidate than McCain might have won a few more electoral votes but there’s no reason realistically to think he would have been granted a four-year extension of Republican rule given Dubya’s rock-bottom approval ratings.  

...The better question here is why Republican primary voters keep nominating candidates like McCain and Romney who are so disdained by the base. Forget whether general election voters would vote for a conservative Republican over Obama if they had the chance. GOP primary voters do have a chance every four years to vote for a conservative. They haven’t done it for two election cycles now. Why not? I’m asking earnestly. I have no answer.

 I'm not going to go into a long thing here, except to say: 

1) As much as I admire anyone willing to admit their ignorance, if Allahpundit doesn't understand the last election - by now - why does he have a job as an analyst? With his fellow editor at Hot Air, Mary Katharine Ham, being a prime example, I see a big part of the Right's problem as having waaay too many people, who know too little, in too many positions of conservative influence. Do they ever look in the mirror (the accurately-named "Ham" comes to mind again) for anything other than to admire themselves? (My one visit to a popular conservative Twitter feed says "no" emphatically,...) 

The truth is, they're self-selected conservative gatekeepers when America needs new blood - and from people who don't look or act like they aspire the country to, or just stepped off the set of, Leave It To Beaver.

 

 2) The reluctance to admit stupidity - to being foolishly "out of touch" - on the part of, both, GOP primary voters and those who feed them (people like Allahpundit and, of course, Instapundit and PJMedia contributor Glenn Reynolds) is especially galling. As I remind Ann Althouse about her political coverage, they've all become experts at following nonsensical minutiae - participating in a media circus as contrived as Ringling Bros. - thinking a person like me will A) either be amused by how clever they imagine themselves to be, munching on red meat, or B) simply can't recognize them as bullshit artists when it comes to any desire to discuss what's important. And they not only destroy their own credibility but that of the entire process by doing so. (I'll remind you, during the last election, I stopped participating on Ann's blog AND was forced to back away from voting for the first time in my life.) It's not supposed to happen that way.

We should never be led politically astray, or support anyone who will do that to us, merely because we're supposedly on the same side and/or it amuses them (or you) to have someone do so.
Fuck that:

They know nothing and they've shown it.

   

I know why we lost - and they deserve no reward for it.