The Scrutiny of Defeat

From fresh-faced young Republican website rebuildtheparty.com:

"2008 made one thing clear: If allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats' structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model -- will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years [ed.- emphasis mine]."

Is that the best euphemism you've ever heard for "our party's control of the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, and the courts and the full flowering of our ideological agenda" or what? Oh Republicans, your attempts to skirt the issue of your incompetent governance in your explanations of your electoral defeat are priceless. Don't ever change.

An Inconvenient Truth

Republicans, please. If you're going to insist on referring to Obama as "emperor," you might want to make mention of the fact that the most imperial thing about his potential presidency is the scope of executive power that Bush and Cheney are feverishly amassing for him.

It might not win you points with the dead-enders, but it will go a little ways toward making you sound less ridiculous. Assuming you're into that.

(I'll take my thanks in the form of all-caps blog comments.)

Why Adapt When You Can Recontextualize?

Q: How much of an unrepentant narcissist do you have to be to squander the power of one of the mightiest elected offices in the world on the unrelentingly incompetent pursuit of a lofty and admirable but hardly unreachable goal, and then declare yourself a "dissident" when the wages of your blundering come home to roost, as though the unquestionably-universally-yearned-for-and-fought-for idea onto which you latched to give flight to your ambition was some sort of unpopular, counter-intuitive seed that you have been furtively trying to plant in the hard, unyielding soil that is potted in the hearts of men?

A: Duh. We know where to place blame when our ideas don't come to fruition, right? It's the system's fault, or the press's fault, or the opposition party's fault, or just plain rotten luck. We certainly wouldn't ever dream of placing that blame in our own fumbling hands. The time for examining our own efforts and assessing the validity of our methods may one day come, but for heaven's sake not now while we're busy strutting around in an unabashed dilettantic fugue. History Will Vindicate Us. Print it on the currency. Brick by brick our good intentions will pave us a mighty road down which we shall gaily skip, eyes aglow in anticipation of the just desserts that await us at the end.