Let’s rephrase that.
Aside from the more than 860,000 whiners who have signed secession petitions since Barack Obama was re-elected president, how is the rest of the Republican Party accepting the results of Election Day?
Well, we have the defeated GOP standard bearer, Mitt Romney, whining to contributors that he lost – not because he was too robotic, disastrously vague and overly enthusiastic about both mining coal and protecting the interests of obscenely wealthy people like himself — but rather because the president doled out gifts to interest groups.
“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Romney told hundreds of donors listening in on a telephone town hall. “In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.”
Too bad for Romney there’s just not enough millionaires and billionaires — the constituency that would have benefited most from his proposed policies — to have put him over the top.
As for those “gifts” — things like letting the children of illegal immigrants attend college without fear of being deported — well, what the Mittster sees as pandering we see as an attempt to implement humane policies in the face of unbridled attacks from an unhinged opposition.
But Mitt, the secessionists aren’t alone in their unwillingness to accept the fact their side lost the big prize of the presidency. Over at the far-right Heritage Foundation they unleashed a virulent television ad declaring war of the president just one day after he won re-election.
“Gracious” is a word that’s apparently been excised from their Funk & Wagnalls. “Rational” is another word that appears beyond their reach.
Fortunately for the losers, there are some among them who still maintain a residence in what’s known as the real world.
There’s Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal who, in the aftermath of the ass-kicking his party suffered, informed the GOP that its time to “stop being the stupid party.”
That’s something we’ve been saying for a long time. Maybe they’ll listen better now that the message is coming from one of their own.
Also worth listening to is Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard.
“It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” Kristol said on the “Fox News Sunday” TV program. “It really wont, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”
Neither do we.
They don’t even have to vote in favor of letting income tax rates go up on families making more than $250,000 a year. They just need to vote to keep the Bush-era tax cuts for the rest of us, while letting them expire for those in the top brackets.
But, unfortunately, even some of those who are choking back the bile and actually uttering the word “compromise” — people like House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — are insisting they won’t work to implement any hike in income tax rates for anyone, even though a clear majority of voters decided to cast their ballots in favor of the candidate who campaigned on the idea of having the wealthy kick in more to help get us out off the financial mess we are in.
Instead, Boehner is talking about raising revenues by closing tax loopholes.
Given the size of deficits that we are facing, and the draconian cuts that will be implemented if a deal isn’t reached by January, we say: why not do both?
But compromise just doesn’t seem to be part of the modern Republican Party’s DNA.
A Pew Research Center poll taken after the election found that fully half of the Republicans surveyed said they wanted congressional GOP leaders to “stand up to Obama.” Only 46 percent said they wanted Republicans in Congress to “work with” the president.
As for the Dems polled, 54 percent said the president should “work with” Republican leadership to break the gridlock that has hampered recovery efforts.
And then there were the 42 percent of lefties who wanted the prez to stand up to the right-wingers.
The way we see it, the president, having emerged from a grueling campaign with a majority of the electorate on his side, has the clear upper hand as negotiations intended to avoid the approaching “fiscal cliff” get under way.
So go ahead and deal — just don’t forget that the deck is stacked to favor one side here.
And that would be the side that’s not the “party of stupid.”
Let the healing begin!
