Republicans: Ten Reasons Why You Deserved to Lose

So you're a faithful Republican who's just woken up Wednesday morning to the most terrifying news possible. It's like "Red Dawn" but for real. And worst of all, it did not come about through a foreign invasion, but rather the American people voted the enemy right into office! How could this happen? In America? In our lifetimes?

Well, if you're one of the 8% of Americans who, in a recent poll, thought that the country was going in the "right direction," then let me explain it to you in a way that you can understand. Grab a cup of hot cocoa, pull up a chair, and pay attention to how it was that Republicans destroyed their own party and nearly destroyed the country that we all love in the bargain. Let me explain why it is that, in the opinion of many good Americans, real Americans from real America, you deserved to lose, and should never again be trusted with any meaningful degree of power if this nation hopes to survive another 225 years.

10) The National Debt: From our nation's founding, in 1776 to the year 2001, The United States of America managed to accumulate about $5 trillion dollars of public debt. From 2001 to 2008, with a Republican president wielding a veto pen in the Whitehouse, and the GOP in control of both houses of congress, the national debt doubled in size to some $10 trillion. You read that correctly: it took only eight years of Republican stewardship to double 225 years of accumulated government debt. When Bill Clinton handed over the presidency to George Bush in 2001, the U.S. was running a $200 plus billion surplus and was on target to pay off the entire national debt by the year 2012. GOP partisans continue to insist that the surplus was not Bill Clinton's legacy, but rather, a tribute to the fiscal conservatism of the Republican congress. But when Republicans finally got hold of all three branches of government, they quickly put the lie to the myth of GOP fiscal conservatism by slashing taxes and enacting spending priorities that led to an explosive growth in Federal outlays. With the national debt at an all-time high, only a blind partisan can continue to deny that it was, indeed, the Democratic president, who brought a sound fiscal hand to the U.S. government in the 1990s, not Newt Gingrich's GOP.

9) Osama Bin Ladin: On September 11, 2001, 19 members of the Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization headed by Osama Bin Ladin, successfully carried out the single most gruesome, brutal and criminal terrorist attack on the United States of America in all of her history as a nation, resulting in the loss of nearly 3000 innocent lives. On September 11, 2008 Osama Bin Ladin was still a free man, hiding in the hills of Pakistan, and he remains a free man to this day. Republican President George W. Bush has been commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces that entire time. And during that period, well over 4000 young American soldiers have died fighting a $600,000,000,000.00 war that, regardless of whether you were for it or against it, was objectively not aimed at bringing Bin Ladin to justice. He is a scarlet letter, forever burned in your chest, a symbol of your bluster and unforgivable ineptitude. Should Bin Ladin die a free man, of natural causes, it will be your shame to bear forever.

8) Paul Krugman: In October of 2008, Princeton Economist and G.W. Bush gadfly Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. Even most partisan conservative commenters tended to agree that the prize was well deserved. This one, clearly, isn't Bush or the GOP's fault. I present it simply as further proof that God hates Republicans right now, for what you've done to our country.

7) Sarah Palin vs. Katie Couric: Katie Couric is not known for being a particularly tough interviewer. Perhaps that is why nothing appears to have harmed Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's image with the American people more than her disastrous CBS interview with America's spunky sweetheart anchorgirl. GOP partisans insist that Palin was caught off guard by a series of unfair "gotcha" questions, but when you can't even get a base hit off a softball question such as "what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read... to stay informed and understand the world?" then it's painfully obvious that you're not ready for prime-time, heck, you're not even ready for the Buggs Bunny/Road Runner hour. The fact that Palin (along with a semi-literate unlicensed plumber named "Joe") is currently the most popular Republican in the country among the GOP faithful shows what a long, tough slog you've got ahead for yourselves. She's your cross to bear GOPers, and yours is now officially the party of prideful ignorance; suck it up.

6) Mitt Romney: He's handsome, articulate, successful and a family man of strong religious convictions who is still married to his first wife. He rescued the 2002 winter Olympics and brought universal health coverage, GOP style, to the citizens Massachusetts, and he's largely scandal-free... in short, he's everything the GOP could ask for in a future presidential candidate, except that he's also a Mormon. And if there's one hallmark of your party, it's intolerance. So Mitt Romney will never be your party's nominee. Sorry.

5) Creationism: It's a collection of unscientific fairy tales that ask us to accept such absurdities as a 6000 year old age for our planet, a global flood, and starlight from distant galaxies and long dead stars that was created "en route." But every time you see Ben Stein and Ann Coulter paying lip service to this bit of pseudo-scientific stupidity, and every time you watch another moronic TV documentary detailing an expedition to Mt. Ararat in search of Noah's Ark you realize that keeping the GOP base happy means sealing a huge chunk of your intellect, integrity and dignity in a formaldehyde jar and locking it up "for the duration" (see Sarah Palin, above).

4) The Housing Bubble: It's been brewing for the greater part of a decade. Why couldn't the bubble have waited another 6 months to burst? Then you could have blamed the whole thing on Obama. You could have insisted that the markets got spooked by his tax plans or something (forget that whole unregulated credit-default-swap nonsense). And you'd probably have fooled a lot of people, too (see Creationism, Palin above). But it didn't. The market collapsed on your watch, and in a panicked state, you undertook the largest taxpayer funded bailout of private industry in American history. Pundits are facetiously saying that we've become a "socialist" nation now, under Bush. Even Alan Greenspan, a dogmatic Objectivist and erstwhile free-market absolutist, has recanted and proclaimed much of his view of the way in which market function as incorrect. So again: this collapse could have gone down on Obama's watch, but it didn't, because... well... God hates you and wants the blame to fall squarely where it belongs.

3) Larry Craig, Mark Foley, David Vitter, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, Ted Stevens, etc.: Your boys just can't seem to keep their peckers in their pants or their hands out of the cookie jar. You curse the day you ever heard the name Jack Abramoff. And with corrupt hacks like Tom Delay and Alberto Gonzales actively subverting the democratic mechanisms of our judicial system and our government for partisan political purposes, you appear frighteningly fascistic at times, too.

2) Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Robert Novak: All these years you Republicans have assured the American People that it's those shifty-eyed Democrats who put personal power over love of country, but when it finally came time for a presidential administration to settle a political score by unmasking the identity of a covert CIA operative working to keep the country safe from black-market nuclear proliferation, it was Republicans who pulled the trigger. And all your pathetic splitting of hairs as to whether Valerie Wilson was still, technically, under Non Official Cover (a spy, risking her life for her country) only made the American people scratch their heads and wonder: so, just when is it OK to start unmasking our covert operatives in the name of political score settling? Maybe if we'd found WMDs in Iraq you could have tried to insist that you were merely unmasking a disloyal American. But everything her husband Joe Wilson said about the administration and it's ill guided march to war after non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction would eventually prove to be true. Oh yeah, and about those WMDs... well, let's just leave those for another day.

1) Barack Obama: he's the logical antidote to 8 long years of unconscionably awful, disastrous, incoherent, inept, corrupt, hypocritical, inexcusably incompetent Republican control of all branches of government, from the judicial (conservatives enjoy a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court, let us not forget) to the legislative (6 full years of GOP control of both houses of congress) to the executive (the worst president in history). Ask any African American if they thought they'd ever see the day a black man became President, and to a person they'll tell you they did not. That is because they never believed that the nation would be subjected to Republican governance so God awful that a sizable number of racist Southern rednecks, bigoted white-collar "Reagan Democrats" and blue-blood country club Republicans would temporarily set aside their myopic, tribalistic instincts and vote for a Harvard Educated black Democrat, no matter how qualified, no matter how genial, no matter how idealistic and earnest, over a white, all American war hero Republican. What's worse for you is that a whole generation of young idealistic Americans who do not see the world through the destructive and divisive racial lens that your party has been exploiting to win elections since the early 70s have rejected your divisive rhetoric and embraced the idea of a truly post-racial future for our politics. These young voters represent the future political direction of our country, and by large margins, you have alienated and even disgusted them.

So there you have it: ten reasons why, not only should you not be surprised that you lost these elections, but why your party should also probably do us all a favor and just go crawl off in a corner somewhere and go gently into that good night.