Like me, Taibbi has been checking out Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing outlets to see how they're reacting to Obama's re-election. BTW, yesterday there was a good summary at HuffPo of the 11 excuses Republicans are giving for Romney's defeat.
Post-election, finally Republicans are addressing the elephant in the room: that only white men vote GOP. They're "soul-searching" what to do about it. Folks like Limbaugh ask rhetorically if the GOP should just give in and throw tokens at minorities and women to get their votes. Rush even coined a new term: "Hispandering." Yeah, that's gonna help, Rush. Please, for us Democrats, keep it up.
His dismissive attitude echoes that of conservative pundit Edward Klein, who complained on FOX that, "[David] Axelrod and his team had already succeeded in pandering to special interest groups, such as Hispanics, gays, and women." It was such an unconscious, perfect giveaway of the GOP mindset: anybody who is not a straight white guy is a "special interest group" to them! Here's how Taibbi put it:
[T]he fact that so many Republicans this week think that all Hispanics care about is amnesty, all women want is abortions (and lots of them) and all teenagers want is to sit on their couches and smoke tons of weed legally, that tells you everything you need to know about the hopeless, anachronistic cluelessness of the modern Republican Party. A lot of these people, believe it or not, would respond positively, or at least with genuine curiosity, to the traditional conservative message of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.
But modern Republicans will never be able to spread that message effectively, because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they're surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else (by the way, the average "illegal," as Rush calls them, does more real work in 24 hours than people like Rush and me do in a year), is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can't win votes when you're calling people lazy, stoned moochers.
It's hard to say whether it's good or bad that the Rushes of the world are too clueless to realize that it's their attitude, not their policies, that is screwing them most with minority voters. If they were self-aware at all, Mitt Romney would probably be president right now. So I guess we should be grateful that the light doesn't look like it will ever go on. But wow, is their angst tough to listen to.
Not all Democrats are smart, but you don't have to be smart to sense it when somebody despises you and looks down on you. Republicans can't even begin to start persuading people that their policies are right when the best they can do is faking genuine concern and respect for others. Repeat: faking it is the best the GOP can do. On an ordinary day the GOP is downright hostile to them.
By Matt Taibbi
November 8, 2012 | Rolling Stone
