Word has it that Rush Limbaugh has joined Erick Erickson in chasing down any fool rightwingers who stand in Sarah Palin’s way. Embarrassing the McCain campaign with her stupidity was not enough. Dragging down the entire GOP ticket and defrauding the party was not enough. It still won’t stop. The mere memory of Palin (who, sensibly, retreated quietly to Alaska) still has the GOP punching itself in the face while Democrats plan and build.

Do not plan on the entertainment ending any time soon. Those still defending Palin are the types who think the rest of the party’s blinkers are not screwed on tight enough. They will not, can not, admit that that they are wrong. The limb won’t heal, it will get stinkier the longer it stays on there, but good luck with the amputation. Politics is a boxing match.

***Update***

Alternate post title: The Great Foot Hunt.

Also: heh.

Reading about the celebrations in Kenya over the election of Obama, I came across this reminder:

Mr Obama’s victory is being celebrated across the continent.

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it showed “that for people of colour, the sky is the limit”.

The BBC’s world affairs correspondent Adam Mynott says Mr Obama will inherit a foreign policy legacy in Africa that has been one of the high points of the George Bush administration.

Earlier this year President Bush toured through five African nations and people greeted him in their thousands to applaud him for America’s huge contribution in the fight against HIV/Aids.

Since its launch five years ago, his Aids relief programme has spent more than $15bn dollars (£9.5bn) on the continent and saved many thousands of lives.

While Bush will leave office reviled in the United States and hated over much of the world, it will be an odd curiosity that his legacy in Africa will probably be a very good one, and more important, it was earned. Bush legitimately did a lot of good in Africa, and we can argue about specifics and argue there could be more done, but the fact that he did some good should be celebrated. The other thing that Bush did that I have mentioned several times but I think bears repeating was his address after 9/11 in which he defended Islam and more than likely stopped what could have been ugly recriminations against Arab-Americans dead in their tracks. When he did that, he did so immediately, forcefully, and with a clarity and honesty and display of leadership that was visibly absent from virtually every other action of his over the next seven years. It really is something worth applauding, and despite his dismal legacy in virtually every other area, these two actions deserve acknowledgment.

And really, in regards to Africa, it is such a small investment. Look at the good will Bush has earned for us with just 15 billion dollars, and compare it to what we spend in a month in Iraq. Can you imagine what we could do with 15 billion dollars in aid a year, a mere pittance when considering our current budget? It is part of Bush’s sad legacy that his incompetence and neglect leave us financially incapable of expanding his one act of legitimate good.

Jon Henke, writing at the Next Right, has the following to say:

The problem is a movement that plays small-ball and cedes responsibility for infrastructure to business interests, leadership that rewards those who make friends rather than waves, an entrenched Party and Movement support system that mostly supports itself, an echo chamber that has rotted our intellect, a grassroots that is ill-equipped to shape the Republican Party, and a Republican Party that has replaced strategy with tactics, substance with marketing.

These problems can be fixed, but the fix is not cosmetic. The rot is deep. We do not need reformation of the Republican Party; we need transformation of the Republican Party. That is going to require fresh blood, new ideas, new infrastructure…and perhaps more than a little time in the wilderness.

You have earned the time you will spend wandering in the wildnerness. The land on the other side is not a promised land. It will have to be earned, too.

In the WaPo today, George Will notes that GOP carnage in the past two years has produced losses so steep for the Republicans that you have to go back to the Depression to match them, and the reason the house of cards fell so quickly was because, as Henke noted, the rot was so deep. This is not a cosmetic problem for the GOP. This is systemic.

That is what is so damned entertaining about the short-term circular firing squad- it really symbolizes how deep in denial some of these folks are. These guys are delusional if they think the problem was an insufficient number of Red State mugs on the Palin plane and inadequate fealty to the cause. The problem is not inadequate adherence to unnamed “principles,” the problem is that they simply have no principles. They have slogans. Nothing symbolizes the slogan driven tactics over strategy GOP quagmire quite like one of my favorite episodes from the last election- the tire pressure gauge imbroglio.

There was nothing that really summed up the idiocy of the GOP quite like Rick Davis and company passing out tire pressure gauges in an attempt to mock a common sense approach to dealing with one of many aspects of the energy crisis. I am sure it will surprise no one that the brain trust at Red State was issuing action alerts for this, too.

In short, America got seduced by the Republican sweet talk, we took them home into our bedroom for some good times, and instead of performance, it turns out the Republicans have a serious case of electile dysfunction. Rather than hold true to their “principles,” they chose to sit on the edge of the bed for eight years and tell us how good it was going to be, and we lost interest and fell asleep.

When we woke up, we realized that in one way, the GOP had kept their word, in a sense- we did get screwed. And we then had our own payback on Tuesday:

That is a map of the country, and the blue shaded areas are where Americans voted more Democratic than they did in 2004. Say what you will, the American people did not have performance anxiety on Tuesday, and the Republicans got the rogering they deserved.

And this is why Henke is so very right, and the purity police have it so wrong. The Republican party is a train wreck. These short term power struggles and attempts to “re-brand” the GOP are doomed to fail, even though they will be a source of endless entertainment for me. Elevating Cantor and Pence means more of the same from the Republicans.

What the GOP needs to do is cool their heels. The frenetic nonsense of the last few years has gotten them nowhere, and talking about principles is pointless when you have none. The party of limited government talks a good game, but owns the $500 billion dollar deficit this year and $5 trillion in debt from the past two administrations. You don’t get to pretend you are the party of limited government when your crowning achievement of the last eight years is the Schiavo legislation. I suspect the only principles they honestly have left are the ones they know are so repellent to the public at large that they refuse to voice them. Every now and then they act on them, and the public swats them on the nose. See Frost, Graeme.

If they were smart, they would regroup, and decide what they stand for and present it to the American people. Instead, I suspect we will get several more months of infighting over tactics and appearances, and more purges of those who wish to engage in a debate over the party’s direction. It isn’t just that many of the folks leading the purge disagree with George Will and Peggy Noonan and Daniel Larison and Sullivan and Ron Paul about the direction of the future GOP- they want them destroyed for suggesting there needs to be a debate. That is how dead the party is, and Henke is right. They need some time in the wilderness, to figure out who they are and what they believe in and why and how it will be better for the country.

Instead, I suspect we will see Palin pom poms and purity purges, which is all the more humorous given the defections from prominent conservatives to Obama, they are already whittled down to the true belivers. It would be funny if our nation’s currrent two-party system did not require a competent opposition party.

*** Update ***

BTW- I am writing this in a conference presentation that is so dull that I would rather listen to the collected dictionary readings of Al Gore. As such, there will probably be all sorts of grammar and spelling issues, as I am crammed in a uncomfortable chair while writing and occasionally feigning interest in the speaker.

*** Update #2 ***

Yglesias spells this all out in seven words:

“Wingnuts Prepare to Wind the Cocoon Tighter”

Clap louder.

*** Update #3 ***

From the comments at Larison’s:

Let me remind you of who ran in the primaries: Fred Thompson, who has no visible qualifications whatsoever other than a gravelly voice and television crime drama expertise. Mike Huckabee, who is charming and skilled politically, but has no serious knowledge of most issues, especially foreign policy. Rudy Guilliani, a total whackjob with no comprehension of what governing a country actually means. McCain, who as you know has spent a lifetime flaunting his POW status to mask a serious lack of interest in any policy details about anything, including foreign policy, but who has limitless confidence in his own power to accomplish anything he sets his mind to, even though he’s never actually accomplished anything he set his mind to. Ron Paul, who though beloved by his fans and relatively knowledgable, was completely rejected by the party as a whole. And Romney, of course, who is actually relatively intelligent and reasonably well inforned, but who alienated almost everyone outside his own circle of supporters. So how is it exactly that Palin is overshadowed by these giants? It’s not as if Republicans have set a high bar of knowledge, expertise, judgment, and accomplishment. Their “high bar” is all about theatrical performance and nerve, both of which Palin has in abundance.

There’s a reason for this. Any candidate with real intelligence, judgment, and expertise would not support the policies of the Republican party platform, plain and simple. As long as those basic policies remain unchanged, the candidates who will succeed must be able to practice deep denial while acting with full confidence in their righteousness. This means the qualifications to be the GOP nominee are mostly ones of psychological imbalance and theatrical skill. To change that situation, the entire policy agenda of the Republican party would have to change, and that simply isn’t going to happen.

Still waiting for the Republican party to choose a leader.

If it will help her chances I take back every unkind thing I ever said about Sarah Palin. At the very least she clearly has the right stuff to be the RNC finance chair.

***Update***

Awesome. Eric Cantor and Mike Pence will take the #2 and #3 leadership spots in the House GOP. Pence stirred up some trouble when he backed Bush’s abortive immigration plan, but overall these are two of the most ideological true believers in the GOP caucus. If the GOP needs to broaden its appeal through reform then choosing these two is like putting cancer in charge of the chemo.

It has begun.

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

Initial list:

Nicolle Wallace
Steve Schmidt
Mark McKinnon

Since we had way too much traffic for me post post this on Tuesday, here is the beer I opened when terribly sad faces at FOX News announced that Obama had a mathematical lock on the election.

***

It appears that not everybody is willing to concede that Bach’s Prelude to the Cello Suite #1 is the greatest piece of music written by man. In the interest of fairness I will post alternative suggestions from the comments, starting with Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations in 1981.

***Update***

Gould part two:

Somehow or another last night my laptop got infected with a virus. No, I was not surfing pr0n, no, I was not downloading warez, no I did not open an attachment that tells me that it loves me and to click. It just happened.

I get these spammy messages about iemonster, and then thousands of little message windows from symantec telling me my email has been blocked because of content pop up, and now, I fire up the computer, and it auto shuts down.

*** Update ***

Downloaded malwarebytes on one of the conference free computers, put it on the infected machine with a memory stick, and voila, completely fixed.

PC Users- go get Malwarebytes. I am impressed.

I ran ad aware, and it did nothing. Help.

When I made the Clown Shoes category, I had shit like this from the WSJ in mind:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

I will allow Professor Krugman the honors of addressing this with the measure of shrill that it deserves:

Yes, George W. Bush’s status as the most disliked man ever to occupy the White House shows that America was not worthy of him. And attacks on Bush gave aid and comfort to his enemies — unlike the firehose of abuse that will be directed against President Obama, which will of course be an expression of true patriotism.

George Bush- poor, misunderstood, victim of his own successes. Is it January 2009 yet?

Via the comments, this video from the Great Orange Satan:

Among the hits in that video, it is announced that Palin did not know the countries involved in NAFTA nor knew that Africa was a continent. I have no idea how much of this is true, but there can be no doubt that this woman was ill-prepared to be Vice-President and really was pretty ill-informed about a wide variety of things. The Gibson and Couric interviews proved that, with additional proof offered in the form of the complete unwillingness of the McCain campaign to allow her to interact with the press. They were afraid for a reason.

And the sad thing is that the stories about Africa and what not will keep trickling out and be fodder for arguments the next few days- the right wing blogs will say they are smears and people out to get her, reasonable people could agree with that, and what will be missed in all the rumors and leaked stories is the very evidence that she was and is, in fact, a dangerous buffoon. Tim mentioned the Afghanistan wedding strike below, but it is worth repeating:

The U.S. military said today it was investigating a report that an American airstrike hit a wedding party, killing dozens of civilians and prompting new pleas from President Hamid Karzai that foreign forces try harder to avoid hurting and killing noncombatants.

Just three weeks ago, we had this story:

An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials.

The military investigator’s report found that more than 30 civilians — not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted — died in the airstrikes against a suspected Taliban compound in Azizabad.

How is this relevant? Because one of Palin’s more obnoxious and disgusting smears of President-elect Obama was the following:

Among other attacks, Sarah Palin is out on the campaign trail this week accusing Obama of dishonoring the troops, in essence calling them babykillers. This stems from an old charge she (her debate coaches) have resurrected about the Democrat, claiming he said “all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians” some 14 months ago.

Such a statement, she said in last week’s debate, is “a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.”

No, Sarah, accidentally killing civilians in a country you are supposed to be liberating from the bad guys is “reckless, reckless,” and most definitely, “hurts our cause.”

***

Get your head out of the mud and see the situation for what it is. NATO forces are killing civilians. This is not to say that individual soldiers are murderers, that they are rampaging across Afghanistan like bloodthirsty barbarians; it is not to say that the killings are premeditated or purposeful. It is to say that our tactical operations are becoming counterproductive to our mission there. Ignore this, and disregard everything we’ve learned in wars past. Ignore this, and put our troops in greater danger on the ground. Ignore this and further confuse any working moral compass we have left as an enlightened nation.

And ignore it she did. Pig ignorant, reckless, arrogant, immature, and wholly willing to smear the opposition as hating the troops. Who knows if she really didn’t mean to smear Obama falsely, she just was too damned stupid to recognize the truth about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan? It is not a radical leap of logic to assume she simply had no clue. But that doesn’t make it any better. It just highlights what a horrid pick she was and how supremely irresponsible it was for McCain to put the country in this dangerous position.

In this light, it is no wonder why the blogs and the folks at the NRO and the Weekly Standard can’t get enough of good old Sarah. She embodies everything they have loved about the last eight years of free-flowing smears, and they don’t want those heady days to end. Plus, she brings the sparkles and teh sexy:

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

I can see the sparkles from here.

This nation seriously dodged a bullet.

They never learn:

After Gilchrest lost his bid for re-nomination, I noted that the Club for Growth’s efforts to defeat the moderate Republican had probably helped ensure that the seat would be won in November by the Democrats, and it is now quite possible that the Democratic candidate will win there. Andy Harris may come back from his small deficit from absentee voting, but the idea of purging a reliably electable moderate in a closely-divided district during a very poor election cycle for Republicans was asking for trouble. On the whole, in recent elections the only thing that the Club for Growth seems to be very good at growing is the Democratic majority in Congress.

Pretty soon, they will have narrowed themselves down to the “real” conservatives and the true believers. Sadly, that will consist of a half dozen Red State authors, Joe the Plumber, and Sarah Palin.

The prelude for Bach’s cello suite #1 is the greatest piece of music ever written by man. Prove me wrong.

***Update***

As much as I love Rostropovich, he plays this one like he is in a hurry. Yo Yo Ma did it better; just ignore the annoying political ad tacked on at the end.

An American airstrike recently hit another wedding party in Afghanistan with dozens of casualties.

The U.S. military said today it was investigating a report that an American airstrike hit a wedding party, killing dozens of civilians and prompting new pleas from President Hamid Karzai that foreign forces try harder to avoid hurting and killing noncombatants.

I have lost count how many wedding parties we have destroyed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a large number. Having fighter patrols scouring the ground for armed insurgents to kill doesn’t mix with a region where every wedding ends with half the male guests firing in the air to celebrate. Our policy of fighting an insurgency with airpower makes tragic accidents like this inevitable, which is why fighting insurgents from the air is and has always been a stupid policy.

We do it because we lack the forces to patrol the old fashioned way. Granted that boot leather harly worked for the Soviet empire or the British one before that; fighting guerillas is a losing prospect any way you try it. However, the few times it has worked (e.g., Philipines) the strategy more resembled Jack Petraeus than Jack D. Ripper of the Strategic Air Command. We do it because the president wants a body count but he doesn’t want the political cost of American casualties, but by fighting guerillas from the air we accomplish little but to increase the number of Afghans who have had a relative killed by American carelessness.

If we want to fight in the mideast and central asia then we should follow strategies that are not transparently counterprodictive, because they inevitably lead to tragedies like this.

A deadly attack on a U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan in July was executed with the support of some local police and government leaders, as well as villagers, according to an internal U.S. military report.

Story B is the reason why I oppose the policy behind story A.

Jeff Merkley took the lead in the official count in Oregon.

***Update***

Find the latest count here.

Here:

Hey John,

Now that a democrat has been elected to your satisfaction, can you perhaps start steering your blog back to how it used to be, meaning meaningful discussion vs. crap about Sarah Palin’s shopping spree and referring to all conservatives that voted against Obama “racists”? I’m sure you get tired of those who joke that all WV’ers have moonshine stills in their back yard, right?

Look, if anyone can once show me where I said everyone who voted against Obama is a racist, I would appreciate it. Likewise, when Sarah Palin is running around talking about the real America and passing herself off as an everyday person, just like everyone else struggling to make ends meet “dontcha know,” all while claiming Obama pals around with terrorists and doesn’t look at America “like you and me,” pointing out that she ran around looting the RNC to the toon of near 200k at Neiman-Marcus and Saks 5th Avenue does not seem like I am piling on. These issues were relevant and substantive because the REPUBLICANS MADE THEM RELEVANT. When Palin’s entire message is that Obama is a scary friend of terrorists who is not like average Americans and favors socialism, it is PERFECTLY DAMNED FAIR to point out she is not like average Americans and does seem to love the filthy lucre. You don’t like it and think the campaign should have had more “meaningful discussions,” blame her. It wasn’t me sending out chain emails saying Obama was sworn in on the Koran and the rest of that bullshit. It was not me putting Joe the Plumber out there every night to say stupid shit.

And while we are at it, Real America spoke last night:

Results for Guilford County, where Sarah Palin made her remarks about real Americans in pro-America parts of the country:

Obama/Biden 58.75%
McCain/Palin 40.44%

Clearly Sarah Palin was wrong, and she was not in one of the pro-America portions of North Carolina when she made her remarks. And if anyone thinks I am going to not call Obama when I think I see bullshit once he is President simply has not been paying attention.

*** Update ***

BTW- I try to spread as many negative rumors about West Virginia as I can- I hope it keeps people out. We are all toothless, we all have stills in our backyards and sleep with our sisters and are ignorant and stupid. West Virginia is a terrible place. Stay in DC or New Jersey. You don’t want to come here. Serious. Terrible place to live. Awful.

Again, for those of you who have never worked with stats, I am not sure you can appreciate how good Nate Silver and company were at predicting the outcome of the election. They were this good:

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically—for instance, assigns North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time—comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

We also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.

Currently, Obama has 349 electoral college votes, and leads the popular vote 52.4-46.3, or, as Nate called it, by a margin of 6.1 points.

This uncanny accuracy is the equivalent of dropping a penny from the top of a 50 story building and landing it in a shot glass. And not one of those double-shot sized ones, either.

This is sick accurate.