nothing, I repeat nothing, could be more deserving of the schadenfreude tag

I think by now the real fantasy is him putting a .45 in his mouth

My liberal fantasy with Karl Rove involves him spending the rest of his life in a fucking jail cell for war crimes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w_96yOUzRg

He should put a cream on that or something.

Irrelevance? He bilked Adelson and the Kochs for million. He's crying all the way to the bank he can now afford to buy.

So maybe it's an act to prove to the Lord Kochs that he TRIED to help Romney win, and they won't send their Liberty Enforcers around to try and get a refund?

Unfortunately, he's not irrelevant; it's just that people have figured out how to counter him, primarily through voting in numbers. Voter disenfranchisement backfired because the people the Republicans were trying to disenfranchise weren't about to take it sitting down. And appealing to the most bigoted of straight white guys works only when not-straight-white-guys decide to stay home.

Speaking of money, I'm curious about how useful all that money really was. How effective were the super PACs really? What did all that money really buy?

Almost billion spent and the voter turnout seems to have gone down significantly, probably back under 60% this time around.

This was an incredibly low-information election, or at least it seemed to be to me. I don't know how you'd go about measuring that sort of thing but the amount of misinformation was absolutely staggering. If anything, the money helped keep people distracted and away from issues that neither candidate wanted discussed.

But hey, it made for some great TV! Without a doubt this was the single biggest and most ridiculous reality TV show I've ever seen.

early indicators say that SuperPAC money had much less impact than expected

this exactly

Rove doesn't care about Obama or Romney or issues, he cares about the fact that he spent the last five years looking billionaires in the face and assuring them that he was definitely going to win them an election

under Rove's leadership, Romney captured zero swing states and Democrats gained Senate seats

wither Bush's Brain

Ahhhhhh

yep this exactly and now hes always gonna be looking over his shoulder for the black maria pulling up behind him in the employ of the koch brothers...

They aren't catering to anybody. They are who they are attempting to represent. The only Republican who ran like a traditional Republican was John Huntsman, and he was reviled by the establishment. The reason is that the new Republican Party is utterly divorced from what it once was: a pluralistic coalition of New England individualists with socially liberal beliefs, big business executives, Christian conservatives, and Western boom town entrepreneurs. There were even Irish Catholic union workers. It's been so utterly marginalized to the South that it hasn't been able to make up its mind what it really wants to be.

The GOP used to attack the Southern Democrats as New Deal kleptocrats, but they still adhere to New Deal policies. They still seek large amounts of money from the Federal Government to keep their states afloat (1/3 of the Texas state budget is floated by the Feds, look at their treasury's website and see for yourselves).

The GOP is currently unfixable. They cannot at once alienate the ignorance of suburban and Southern rural white men who are desperate to defend what they believe to be the American way while at the same time being a free market pluralistic and inclusive party. Not without a lot of fragmentation and infighting, which is what we'll probably see over the next few years.

The Big Tent is held up by two very different tent poles, economic libertarianism and Evangelical Christianity. I suspect baleen is correct because if the GOP fails one of those groups, they risk splitting the party in two, which would be disastrous.

Just my cynical guess...I think they stick to race. They are absolutely race-obsessed, so I bet they try trotting out minority candidates and courting black church leaders next. That way, they can tell themselves that they can attract more voters in a way that doesn't seriously require any evolution of their outdated belief system.

They're decomposing into their base 19th century coalition elements: Whigs and Nativists.

For the second time in a row, we just saw Tea Party candidates lose senate races that moderate Republicans probably would have won.

And yet I know I'm not going to be surprised at all when many Republicans desperately try (and ultimately succeed) to convince themselves that their problem this cycle was not being far enough to the right.

My cup overfloweth with conservative tears this morning.

'tis truly a bounty to behold

Plan A : Win on strength of character, FAILED.
Plan B : Win on weakness of opponent, FAILED.
Plan C : Win on hatred of own base, FAILED.
Plan D : Win on disharmony in opponent's base, FAILED.
Plan E : Rig the vote, FAILED.
Plan F : Civil War, PENDING.

Yep.

I watched him vomit out all kinds of weird excuses and irrelevant polls this morning. It was so pathetically fascinating I ended up wearing the wrong pair of shoes to work.