"Minutes upon minutes of soul-searching"

Shakes here, with some post-election thoughts...

This is freaking hilarious. Check out this story lead in the WaPo today:

After minutes upon minutes of soul-searching, Republicans are now in recrimination mode. And the GOP's various factions all agree: This wouldn't have happened if the party had listened to us.

That. Is. Awesome.

In the aftermath of the historic GOP losses Tuesday night, moderate Republicans quickly concluded that the party needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans declared that it should be more conservative. Main Street is angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP congressional leadership.

Welcome to the club!

The rest of the article lays out all the various finger-pointing, which provides some amusement—especially for someone like me, who’s been accused of being "why the Democrats can’t win" after every election for years, for reasons generally in the area of "being too liberal" and "having the unreasonable expectation that Democrats not be sexists and homophobes."

In any case, there are obviously a whole slew of reasons why the GOP lost—corruption, greed, out-of-control spending, unprecedented expansion of government, undermining civil rights, inflexible partisanship, cronyism, base pandering, corporate welfare, redistributing wealth upwards, ignoring the environment, wretched prejudices, the Iraq War, Katrina, Terri Schiavo, etc. The American voters had a litany of complaints, and they encompassed interests of all the factions who are now pointing fingers at each other. It was, in the end, everything.

And all of it goes back to a single mistake the GOP made: They forgot that Americans hate their government.

Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens—all of us. We hate our government, because it’s always doing either too much or too little, or simply the wrong things. Across the political spectrum, there is near-unanimous agreement that our government should stay the hell out of our business, unless and until we need them. Defend us and save us—that’s all we want. And we want other things, too, that we don’t associate with government, though we should—clean water, mail, fixed potholes. But we just want it done without having to hear about it. We want our representatives to represent us, and leave us the hell alone.

For good or ill, that’s the lay of the land. And the GOP started ruling as if it weren’t. They fancied themselves rock stars—flying to Scotland for a golf game, flaunting their pork barrel projects. Look at this bridge to nowhere—is this sexy or what? We’ve got a mandate, bitchez; the people love us, they really us! They crawled up their own arses and there they stayed, as if they were celebrities rather than civil servants, and believed they could do anything, because the people love their government.

Fools.

They completely lost all perspective, which is why they started getting everything backwards. They intervened in the Schiavo debacle, and didn’t intervene in NOLA. (At least not quickly enough.) They tried to privatize Social Security, and eschewed the idea of public healthcare. They gave themselves a raise and failed to increase the minimum wage. Backwards. All of it. Because they forgot that the Americans hate their government, except when we need it.

And boy oh boy do we need it now. We need the new government to fix all the disasters wrought by the old one. That gives the Democrats a sterling opportunity to remind America what a dedicated party of civil servants looks like—and let us hate our government again in peace, which is all we really want to do.

(Crossposted at Shakespeare's Sister.)