How to Lose Gracelessly: The Republican Handbook

I never much liked sports when I was in school.  I partly blame the South Florida sun and humidity that makes your clothes stick to you like a lot of Post-It notes in embarrassing places, but most of it is because gradeschool sports culture is a swamp of hurt and grudges and all around foul sportsmanship.  Which is to say it's a lot like the GOP this past week.

The one piece of advice that every P.E. coach I ever had tried and failed to drill into the heads of my classmates was that sports was about having fun and getting your fat ass moving more than it is about winning or losing.  "It isn't whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game," was chanted like a mantra.  And if you're going to lose, at least do yourself a favor and lose with dignity and learn why you lost so you can play a better game next time.

In this case, the GOP strategy for losing is about as screwed up as their campaign was.

From Paul Ryan blaming black "urban" voters, to Romney blaming "gifts", to Rove claiming voter suppression on the part of the Democrats because they convinced people not to vote for Romney -- Karl, that's called campaigning, voter suppression is what you guys tried to do in Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio, among other places -- it's like a handbook for how to lose in the sorest way possible since Kenneth Pinyan.

And if they're not trying to blame black people and poor people and women and gays being allowed to vote as the reason they lost, they -- or at least Fox News, but these days same difference -- turn to the old standby, the batshit conspiracy theory.  They turn to Benghazi and Fast and Furious as an empty "I told you so" to anyone who will listen.  Which, strangely enough, not even they're doing.

This is not how you lose if you ever want to win again.  Not just because it's dickish.  Not because it's racist.  Not because it's condescending.  Not because it's a turnoff to everyone but your most brainwashed sycophants.  It's all of these things, yes, but there's an even bigger reason that even someone who is a racist, condescending dick should be able to appreciate:

If you're blaming everyone else and shooting Oliver Stone films in your spare time, you aren't learning a goddamned thing about why you actually lost.  And if you don't do that, if you don't look back at the game footage with a critical eye to see exactly where you screwed up and how you should avoid screwing up that way again, you will never be able to win another title.

When even Bobby Jindal -- the guy who allowed Creationist propaganda to masquerade as science in Louisiana public schools -- is telling you to "stop being the stupid party", I think it's time to face the room full of addicts and admit you have a problem.

Why the GOP Has Lost Far More Than the Election

November 6, 2012 was a win.  Not just for President Obama, but for everyone in the United States with a firm grip on reality.  For those who truly care about making this country better for everyone who lives in it, not just the privileged few at the top.  For those who want to see this nation succeed in spite of one half of its two-party system doing damn near everything to sabotage it.

Which means, of course, that it was a loss for the Republicans.  Just the latest in a long line of losses that stretches back the last two decades.

And what they have lost goes way beyond mere elections.  They have lost their anchor in the fabric of the world.  Some out there will invariably say that Mitt Romney was not elected because he was merely unlikeable; he let his true colors come through too often, and the American people decided they just weren't as into Piero Manzoni as his strategists had anticipated.  But it goes so much deeper than that.

The first problem the GOP has is that it's trying to appeal to an America that no longer exists.

This is only a slight oversimplification.  The demographic the GOP has always depended on to vote them into office -- the white, upper-crust churchgoing men with trophy wives and two-point-five children -- has been steadily shrinking since the late 1980s.  America has gotten browner, gayer, and less concerned with who created the universe.

Compounding this is that the GOP depends on that white, upper-crust churchgoing man to be not just staunchly conservative, but fearful of change.  Because that fear is to their power what the One Ring is to Sauron.  It's the basis for everything they do.  They can't use gays, atheists, and brown people as threats to the American way of life unless the white men they're pandering to have enough sphinctre-loosening terror to prey upon.  And that fear has been steadily dissipating for the last eight years.  Ever since Massachusetts made it clear that people can marry who they want, and the Earth will keep spinning and the sky will stay up because astrophysics and human sexuality have the same effect on each other as iocaine powder does on The Dread Pirate Roberts.

This is not to say that there aren't still some scared, angry white guys out there.  There are plenty.  That Obama's win in this race was significantly less of a landslide victory than it was in 2008 against a far less extreme opponent and with record numbers of minority voters is clear evidence of that.  But there just aren't enough paranoid, angry white people to sustain the GOP as they are.

The second problem for the GOP is, quite frankly, the internet and the age of free and immediate information that it has fostered.  Thirty years ago, it could take days or even weeks of research to refute a false claim in a political ad or a debate, and even longer to put that new information into people's hands.  Now, with the internet being more popular than television as a news source, people all over the country can fact-check what you say as you say it and put that information out there before you even know what your next lie is going to be about.  You can't just swiftboat your way into office anymore.  As this election and the 2008 election have proven, people do care about facts.  And now that those facts are available on-demand, wherever and whenever they're needed, people care about them more than ever.

The third, and biggest problem, is that the GOP refuses to acknowledge the first two problems.  It refuses to face reality, because reality is hard and unforgiving.  It's a very childlike mentality of hoping that if they ignore unpleasant things, they will go away.

First, they selected Mitt Romney as their frontman.  The upper-crustest, churchgoingest, angriest, whitest unless he's appearing before an Hispanic audience guy they could find.  Next, they ignore every piece of bad news that surfaces about him.  They ignore his unreleased tax returns.  His record of assaulting classmates with scissors.  His seemingly pathological need to lie.  His inability to do simple math.  His hypocritical denouncing of his own policies.  His contempt for nearly half the country he's depending on to elect him.  And the train-loads of smarm that ooze from every pore of him like poison ivy.  It's less like ignoring the elephant and more like ignoring the giant pile of elephant droppings while everyone else in the room is gagging on the stench.

It's a policy that clearly doesn't work anymore when not even the most blatant attempts at voter suppression since the Reconstruction Era could save their candidate.

What they must take from this election if they're ever going to win another one is that progress is like a glacier; slow, almost imperceptibly so at times, but ultimately unstoppable.  And as with a glacier, you have three options when one is bearing down on you: 1) move forward with it, 2) get out of the way, or 3) get buried by it.

The GOP's fact-free fantasy bubble of being able to rely on lies and paranoid white men can't shield them any longer.  The principle of evolution applies as much to politics as it does to biology: you either adapt, or you go extinct.