Griper Blade: GOP Loser-Heroes and the Conservative Cult of Victimhood

One of the more overlooked hurdles to the big Republican Party rebranding project is the fact that the base loves victims. Sarah Palin perfected cashing in on this tendency, making a career out of being a victim of the "lamestream media." And their love of victims necessarily makes them lovers of losers. Anyone who can play the victim card while saying, "I just might've won if it wasn't for..." is a hero. As is the case with Mike Huckabee, you can even get a show on Fox News. This isn't universally true, of course -- neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney are too beloved by the base these days -- but that's more a case of taking their losses with a measure of dignity and grace than anything. To be a rightwing loser-hero, you have to complain and gripe and whine and basically throw a child's "It's not fair!" sort of tantrum. For whatever reason, poor losers are winners in wingnuts' eyes. Graceful losers are RINOs.



But how constructive is it to continually refight the last battle? No matter how much she complains and whines, the 2008 election isn't going to be overturned somehow and Sarah Palin made vice president. Nursing grievances serves no useful purpose -- especially when you seem completely unwilling to learn a damned thing from your loss. At heart, the rightwing loser-hero represents as big a hindrance to the GOP as their runaway racism, sexism, homophobia, and Christian supremacism. When you're trying to win elections, it probably is a good idea to listen to losers -- provided the purpose is to learn from mistakes. But it's a bad idea to listen to losers who blame everyone in the world but themselves. The belief that your campaign was perfect and the media, voters, and opposition was flawed is no way to get ahead in politics. Which means this tendency among Republican voters to idolize losers is a tendency Democrats should applaud.



Behold the stupid:

NationalJournal:



Since Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus introduced the “Growth and Opportunity Project” in mid-March, the party has proven over and over and over again that it just isn’t ready to change.



The latest example of the GOP being intellectually and politically stuck in the 2012 presidential primaries comes courtesy of one of the stars of those disastrous contests: former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. According to Santorum, the Republican Party’s path to revitalization is not a new round of engagement with women, young voters, and other groups that delivered an electoral landslide to President Barack Obama in November. No, Santorum has a different plan for saving the GOP: defunding Planned Parenthood.



The Raw Story reports that Santorum presented his three-point plan to save the party in a fundraising email over the weekend: mobilizing “pro-family conservatives,” “refuting the lies and half-truths that our detractors in the GOP are spreading about us,” and attacking the women’s’ health care provider.

Yes, let's go with Rick Santorum's ideas, seeing as how they worked so well the last time. He's got the plan to win over those lady voters...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]