I really with the GOP would drop the religious shit. I don't know if that's a possibility.
My uncles a fucking minister and even he doesn't go around spouting his beliefs like these lunatics.
SAT NOV 10, 2012 AT 10:09 AM PST
Evangelicals get it; GOPers still don'tThis morning on AlterNet, an article about how the Republican fantasyland was shattered on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning made the rounds. Like many of the other articles deconstructing and describing the Republican mass meltdown in reaction to their losses all across the board, it does a good job of summarizing without going on too long about it. (That article can be found below.)
What sparked this diary was the interaction between an interesting point made in the comments to that article (which I'll quote after the fleur-de-Kos), and another article I saw this morning about how evangelicals are slowly realizing that the issue isn't that Americans don't understand their positions, it's that we increasingly don't agree with them. While this has thrown the evangelical right for a loop, they are at least looking for ways to regroup. The Republicans, however, are not - instead, they're doubling down and casting about to find ways to make sure that the reason for their failure is our lack of understanding, rather than the foulness of their agenda.
Come with me over the jump for some discussion.
Here's the comment I found rather interesting from that AlterNet piece:
"The papers today and yesterday report claims by Republican leadership that their message was not the problem [sic] it was just that they didn't have the correct tactics to get that message across to the current demographics of the US."Compare this to the second article I found, the one about the evangelical shock:
“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.
“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”So it seems that evangelicals are beginning to get the point of their failure. It's not that we don't understand their message or their belief system. It's that we do understand it, and because we understand it,
WE REJECT IT. As much as they dislike hearing it, they realize that it's not an issue of whether we understand (we do), but that their fundamental message is frankly revolting to us. They may blame it on the secularization of society, but they also realize that that secularization means people aren't going to agree with them on these issues - not now, not ever.
I wonder how much time it will take for the rest of the Rethuglicans to catch up to the evangelicals on this very simple point - that it isn't that we don't understand their agenda or their ideology, it's that we do understand it, and that we will never agree with it.
For example:
We do not agree that women have no right to birth control.
We do not agree that women have no right to control of their own bodies.
We do not agree that there is any such thing as "legitimate rape."
We do not agree that women should remain second-class citizens.
We do not agree that brown people are somehow of less worth than white people.
We do not agree that being brown is an automatic crime.
We do not agree that gays and lesbians are spawn of the devil, or criminal, or making a choice to be gay or lesbian.
We do not agree that abortion is murder, or that a fetus is a human being.
We do not agree that cutting taxes on the rich will make the country's economy grow.
We do not agree that rich people have the right to abuse the poor through "right to work" laws, or anti-labor laws, or anti-union laws, or refusal to provide health care.
We do not agree that bootstraps are the only way to success.
We do not agree with the lack of a social safety net or the deep cuts that are being made in it all the time.
We do not agree that education should only be for those lucky enough to have rich parents they can borrow from, or that science is the spawn of the devil.
We do not agree that the earth is 6,000 years old.
We do not agree that the President is not an American citizen, or that he was born anywhere other than Hawai'i.
We do not agree that their last golden boy, George W, did anything but damage the country.
We do not agree that the rich know how to run the country anywhere but into the ground.
Yes, we
understand their positions on every one of these issues. But we do not, and we never will, agree with their positions, because their positions violate the fundamental meaning of what it is to be American.
This is what the Rethuglicans don't yet understand: those of us who voted against them, see through them. Those of us who voted against them are too smart to be taken in by their fantasy-bubble-world ideology. Despite their attacks on education, science, government, the social safety net, the poor, the brown, the female, the young, the queer - we are still not dumb enough to believe their lies.
Their strategy has always been to appeal to the stupid and the angry - heck, one of their representatives actually said they'll never reach the "elite, smart people."
The stupid people can be reached through all the things they're attacking (education and science), which is why they want so desperately to suppress those things. The angry people are dying off, and most of the people who are replacing them in the ranks of voters aren't stupid enough to get that riled up over issues that are this ridiculous. And no matter how much they try to make us "understand" their position, they will never, ever see that we do understand it - and that we have roundly rejected it.
The GOP is becoming as obsolete and irrelevant as the Whigs in 1860 - and good riddance to them. Evolution talks a lot about the survival of the fittest due to best adaptation to current circumstances. The GOP is not adapting. And like any other organism confronted with a hostile environment that doesn't adapt to that environment, it won't survive much longer.
Pass the popcorn and the Raisinets. This should be fun to watch.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/10/1160039/-Evangelicals-get-it-GOPers-still-don-t
How the Right-Wing Media's Fantasy World Caused a Republican Meltdown on Election NightBy Lauren Kelley | November 8, 2012
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
Despite all evidence to the contrary, right-wing pundits were telling whoever would listen that Romney would win by a landslide.November 8, 2012 | The greatest thing on television Tuesday evening wasn’t Obama’s victory speech. It wasn’t Romney’s concession speech. It wasn’t even John King’s gentle caress of the CNN Magic Wall.
It was the Fox News team’s collective meltdown when the network’s own analysts called the election for Obama.
In fact, Fox might have given us the most entertaining five minutes of cable news in television history. Karl Rove in particular couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that Romney had lost. He sent Megyn Kelly downstairs to the Fox election desk to find out what had happened. Despite one of the election desk staffers saying he was 99.5 percent sure about the outcome, Rove insisted that there must have been a mistake. If you look at the footage closely enough, you can actually see smoke come out of Rove’s ears as his brain malfunctions. At one point even Megyn Kelly couldn’t take Rove’s BS any longer and asked him if the number-crunching he was doing was “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.”
But it wasn’t only the on-air personalities at Fox who were shocked and appalled by the election outcome. White conservatives across the nation were caught off guard, and oh how they mourned . As the AlterNet team wrote in a post-election roundup , it’s pretty easy to see why: despite all evidence to the contrary, right-wing pundits were telling whoever would listen that Romney would win by a landslide. They attacked Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger and statistics savant, who, it turns out, nailed it . They claimed Black voters wouldn’t turn out for Obama, and plenty of other obvious nonsense. Basically, they were living in a fantasy land that did not reflect the reality of the election or the citizens of this country.
At the Christian Science Monitor , Gloria Goodale has an interesting piece on the right-wing media’s alternate version of reality. She writes:
[R]ather than the purportedly surprising election results reflecting some national subversion of the voting process, many political scientists and other analysts say this right-wing upset is dramatic evidence of a growing partisan divide in our media.
Increasingly, the public consumes media that reinforce personal views rather than give actual information about the world, says University of San Francisco political scientist Corey Cook.
“The biggest story of this election is the stories that were being told about the election,” says Professor Cook....“It was really as if places like MSNBC and Fox were talking about completely different races,” he adds.Goodale’s sources also note that major networks like NBC share some of the blame in misleading viewers. But in their case, the deception seems to have been largely relegated to claims that the race was neck-and-neck, when in fact Obama was the clear leader in the polls; close elections are of course better for ratings.
Outlets manufacturing a false sense of drama to make more money is loathsome, but the fallout from the right-wing media’s trip to la-la land seems to be much more profound for conservatives who were given a false sense of hope. Whether many conservatives will disavow Fox and its ilk over its election lies remains to be seen. But it’s entirely possible that this time the right-wing media has gone too far. As Amanda Marcotte wrote in a blog post earlier today,
“Without lies, what does the right wing media have? Not much.”Recipe for a new dark ageEven The Simpsons mock Karl RoveFirst Political Disappointment: Obama winsIMO, the only chance the Republicans have of moving forward is to listen to guys like Bobby Jindal. If they put him out front, they may stand a chance. If they continue on their current trajectory and they'll be as extinct as the dinosaurs.