On his show last Friday, while the NSA story was blazing its way through the tubes, Rush Limbaugh said, “So there is clearly — somewhere, somehow, in some form or another — a coup taking place, and there is an assault on privacy, and there are assaults on people because of their politics and their ideology. It is taking place; it’s undeniable.”

An assault on privacy, he said. Limbaugh continued, “I don’t want my government doing this. I do not want my government preoccupied with paying this close attention to what every citizen is doing every minute of the day. This government’s already too big, it’s too damn powerful, and it’s too unforgiving — and this doesn’t have anything to do with competent intelligence gathering. Throwing wide nets like this is BS. It’s assuming way too much to think that this is not a big deal. Left-wing overreaction, my backside.”

Uh-huh. Yeah. Rewind several years to 2007 and 2008 when Congress and the Bush administration passed the Protect America Act, along with the FISA Amendments of 2008. The entire Republican establishment was lined up in jingoistic lockstep behind the Bush administration’s efforts to eavesdrop without warrants and spent countless hours both scaring their listeners to death while shaming liberals and the Democratic Party over any and all resistance in codifying the administration’s illegal covert wiretapping.

But as we’ve learned time and time again, selective amnesia doesn’t seem to permeate the zero barrier between January 19, 2009 and January 20, 2009, so let’s take a look at some history, shall we? Yep. Here goes…

On August 15, 2007, Limbaugh said, “[Then Senator Hillary Clinton] opposed the FISA reforms that would allow us to listen into communications and see the communications of international terrorists who are communicating with other international terrorists, even outside the country whose messages simply happened to flow through US telecom networks. You know, again, I’m a little bit surprised that somebody with a record so weak on these things would somehow deign to lecture this president.”

On February 29, 2008, Limbaugh said, “Nancy Pelosi is refusing a vote on the new security bill, the new FISA bill. They still, the Democrats, when it comes to national security, the defense, the protection of this country, I don’t care who our candidate is, they cannot be trusted with it, the Democrats cannot.”

On July 10, 2008, Limbaugh said, “Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Democrat Party, have tried to undermine the FISA court, they’ve tried to undermine the FISA bill, they have stood in the way every time it’s come up for a vote, though, after all the huff and puff that they do, they eventually pass it.”

And now these very same surveillance programs are egregious invasions of privacy, according to Limbaugh — the laws he helped to pass as the central media spokesman for the Republican Party and the Bush administration are now considered a “coup taking place.”

Who else on the right has suddenly emerged as a Johnny-come-lately Greenwald civil libertarian?

Monday morning, Joe Scarborough, during an interview with Glenn Greenwald, referred to the the NSA’s eavesdropping and data monitoring operation as “excessive” and “expansive,” even though Scarborough has been one of the most vocal supporters of the CIA’s use of torture as a counter-terrorism measure, going so far as to shout down guests on his MSNBC show.

Monday night, Bill O’Reilly lashed out at the NSA, referring to the PRISM operation as “unconstitutional.”

But here was O’Reilly in 2006 praising warrantless eavesdropping with Newt Gingrich as revelations about the Bush program came to light:

O’REILLY: Well, the ACLU doesn’t want that, but here’s my argument. And this is a winner all day long. The wiretap laws are set up to prevent criminal — criminal abuses, investigating criminal cases. This is a military matter. It’s a military matter.

GINGRICH: Right.

O’REILLY: You can intercept anything you want, any kind of communication you want without a warrant in a war. And that’s it. And that’s what they should do.

O’Reilly was ballyhooing the idea that within the boundries of the war on terrorism, the military could do anything it wants to do.

What about Glenn Beck? Yesterday, he called Edward Snowden a “hero” and tweeted, “I think I have just read about the man for which I have waited. Earmarks of a real hero.” And, “The NSA patriot leader is just another chance for America to regain her moral compass and set things right. No red or blue. Just truth.”

Rewind to February, 2008, when Beck passionately demanded that the Protect America Act, with its warrantless eavesdropping powers, be renewed immediately:

Now, after 9-11, you remember we came up with all kinds of new — aggressive new laws to combat a new kind of enemy. One of them was the Patriot Act. Another one was the Protection — Protect America Act. This was an extension of our eavesdropping. It helped our government listen in and find terrorists.

Well, over the weekend, the House failed to pass this bill, which would have prevented the Protect America Act from lapsing — an extension requested by the president. It’s got a six-month sunset over and over again. He feels — and I happen to agree with him — that this congressional game-playing by Nancy Pelosi will end up killing Americans.

The Democrats who opposed the eavesdropping were responsible for potentially killing Americans!

It was advocacy like this from Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Beck and the right-wing establishment that created the Protect America Act and especially the FISA Amendments of 2008, which included Section 702, under which the operation that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and the others have been describing for the last handful of days was initiated. No, the FISA debate wasn’t solely about wiretapping phone conversations, it also included internet data monitoring. This was widely discussed and debated during the final two years of President Bush’s second term in office. It’s all on the record.

Sure, it can be argued that as soon as the raunchy sausage-making was revealed, the vomiting naturally ensued. I mean, who could’ve guessed that force-feeding intense, well-marketed horror stories about terrorism into minds of the American public and news media in order to establish a massive eavesdropping infrastructure would give rise to the NSA’s intelligence gathering operations just several years later? Here’s just one of the videos produced by the Republican Party as a means of scaring the piss out of the American people during the early 2008 fight to renew the warrantless eavesdropping codified in the Protect America Act:

If you’re wondering how all of this began, look no further than fear-mongering like that video — a video which, again, was literally produced by the Republican Party and posted on GOP.com.

Other than some heretofore unknown details such as, but not exclusively, the FISA court’s authorization for the NSA to collect over three months of Verizon phone records, along with the PRISM data analysis program, of course, the nuts and bolts of what the NSA is doing is all outlined in those laws that the conservative movement demanded with every fear-mongering chunk of hyperbole they could muster. The fact that so many people, especially and almost exclusively on the right, are shocked by the NSA story is an egregious abrogation of personal responsibility, consistency and memory.

So we can assume that Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Joe Scarborough and Bill O’Reilly will pitch in and finally help to repeal the 2001 AUMF, the USA PATRIOT Act and all the rest of the post-9/11 madness they helped to establish. Great! Now we can finally ejector-seat that horrendous era onto the slagheap of historical American blunders. We can also assume that, if there’s another attack, that these same actors won’t turn around — yet again — and blame the Democrats and Obama for weakening our national security structure. No. Of course they won’t do that.

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When I was in high school, I was an insufferable young Republican. I’ve talked about this on my podcast and on the blog, so it’s not any sort of revelation. Like a lot of kids who self-identify as conservative, as soon as I left home and began to learn about the real world, among other things via higher education in the field of political science, my personal values and politics rapidly shifted leftward simply because, as Stephen Colbert famously said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

But in the late 1980s, like many confused, awkward conservative kids, I also was totally addicted to the Morton Downey Jr. Show. Downey was the television Patient Zero who spawned both the Jerry Springer talk show circus format and the Bill O’Reilly Fox News pundit format. He was a far-right, cigarette-smoking screamer who hosted a syndicated telecast that was set up like a daytime talk show, complete with an audience and a panel of on-stage guests, and the topics, at least initially, were all wafer-thin political issues. Needless to say, 17-year-old political junky me in 1988 and 1989 absorbed it like a really shouty drug.

So when I watched a new documentary about Downey titled ÉVOCATEUR: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie, released to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Downey’s show, I was both surprised and not surprised at all to learn that it was essentially a political broadcast specifically designed for 17-year-olds boys with every topic simplified into digestible good-or-evil, right-or-wrong, with-us-or-against-us ultimatums. And of course it was. Post-Reagan conservatism is largely based on stunted, undeveloped, childish, contra-empirical ideas about the world — ideas that both confirm and enable simplistic notions about the role of government in society. The success of the Downey show was due to the carefully choreographed delivery of the ideas from an authoritative, alpha-male role model who wasn’t afraid to throw down like a testosterone-possessed teenage boy. He was a heavy metal political rocker without the hair and leather and he used the persona to tap into that politically immature mindset.

The movie artfully carries us through Downey’s career and, augmented by animation sequences that reminded me of Gerald Scarfe’s work on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, illustrates what compelled Downey’s ambition and what contributed to his crash-and-burn disintegration. It seems as if Downey was always seeking to escape from his famous Dad’s shadow (Morton Downey Sr. was a popular crooner). The challenge to live up to his father’s success perpetually haunted him, especially when it became clear he didn’t quite have his Dad’s talent for singing. But Downey kept trying and trying to make it in the music business which eventually led him into Top 40 radio in the 1970s. Like many of the modern conservative talkers, the transition from music to right-wing talk seemed more of a career move rather than any real interest in changing public policy. There’s money in conservative entertainment, so… why not? Later, Downey was fired from a Sacramento, California radio station after referring to an Asian caller as a “Chinaman.” He was replaced by newcomer Rush Limbaugh.

Throughout the film, various interviewees hint at the fact that Downey’s on-air persona was mostly an act. Talk show host Richard Bey came right out and said in the movie, “It was an act, just like Sean Hannity is an act. It’s television.” Downey’s lifelong friend Lloyd Schoonmaker said of Downey’s politics, “He would seem to go in either direction, whatever would seem to work at the time.”

The act involved a pumped up studio audience; a topic — usually political; a panel of tomato can guests who Downey could easily destroy with the help of 180 superfan accomplices; a lot of cigarette smoke; a lot of shouting and in-your-face confrontations; a cartoon parody version of political debate; Downey’s gigantic mouth full of capped chompers and ultimately no real resolution. Pat Buchanan describes the atmosphere of the show as “the angry voices of people left behind.” “Angry” tends to understate the emotional content of the show.

The tone and style that made it a ratings hit ultimately destroyed it, just as Downey’s obsession with showmanship — the act — ultimately destroyed his reputation. In the documentary, Downey’s former producers recalled how, after a while, they were simply unable to book legitimate guests because no one wanted to endure the abuse. In one segment which I had totally forgotten about until I watched the movie, Downey rips into Ron Paul who was struggling over the studio chaos to talk about his support for drug legalization. Downey shouted him down and implied that Ron Paul’s high, plaintive voice was due to Paul’s shrunken testicles. (If Downey had been interested in nuance he would’ve realized that Ron Paul was and is farther to the right than Downey and would go on to become the most conservative member of Congress.)

So the show’s producers relied almost entirely on both Al Sharpton (also portrayed in the documentary as a showman first and foremost) and the African American activist’s involvement in the controversial Tawana Brawley case, interspersed with panels that would become Jerry Springer fodder six years later: freaks, KKK guys, strippers and nutbags. During a particularly shocking scene in the movie, Downey confronts a stripper with the misogynistic threat, “I’d show you how to kick the living shit out of a broad!” The producers of the show also describe how Downey offered another stripper from the same panel a job as a producer on the show. The next day, Downey called the woman into the men’s room and asked her to hold his penis while he urinated. “Conservative” values indeed. Suffice to say, the movie reveals Downey’s obvious sociopathy and anger toward women. Years later, the infamous feminist lawyer and activist Gloria Allred, who was also a guest on his show, attended Downey’s funeral.

The show was canceled after existing for less than two years. But Downey wasn’t finished with “the act.” In a fit of desperation, perhaps for publicity or perhaps to win the sympathy of his third wife, Downey staged a publicity stunt in which neo-Nazis accosted him in a bathroom, cut his hair and drew a swastika on his face with a magic marker. Of course he did it to himself — the swastika drawing was hilariously botched, among other things (if there’s one thing neo-Nazis are familiar with, it’s swastikas). The year after his show was canceled, he filed bankruptcy, hosted two random shows on CNBC and in 1996 he was diagnosed with lung cancer (four packs of cigarettes a day!) which eventually killed him in March of 2001.

I can’t help but to imagine that if Downey had remained healthy, he would’ve fit perfectly into the Fox News line-up, especially followng the 9/11 attacks when the simplistic 17-year-old-teenager “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” brand of patriotism infected the entire nation. In fact, I believe part of the reason Downey’s show failed so rapidly was because it was presented out of the context of right-wing cable television which wouldn’t appear until ten years after Downey. If it had been nestled within a channel that featured other like-minded shows, who knows? Maybe it would’ve continued a little longer. But ultimately, as the movie discusses, Downey’s unsustainable style killed his show. Fox News pundits on the other hand have learned to modulate the frequency and volume of their apoplectic freak-outs, unlike Downey.

He was the botched prototype that led to thousands of media ideologues who deliver Downey-inspired conservatism to low information voters — discarding the bits of the carrion that didn’t work while horking all of the good stuff, including a prominent degree of deception. I feel like 17-year-old me was taken by a well-crafted scam artist. Likewise, I firmly believe that Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the others are doing the same to their audiences — the only difference being that the audiences of today’s conservative talkers are old enough to know better.

The documentary, to be released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures on June 7, is a fantastic companion to Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, which documented the life and times of another influential conservative menace from the 1980s. Lee Atwater was to Karl Rove and Republican politics what Downey was to Bill O’Reilly and Fox News. Both succumbed to cancer after infecting politics with viruses that are still being transmitted years after their deaths. ÉVOCATEUR is required viewing if you’re at all interested in the evolution of the conservative entertainment complex and, more importantly, the development of the modern conservative movement with all of its accompanying showmanship, hyperkinetic jingoism, simplicity and bumper sticker sloganeering.

Downey wasn’t the first right-wing talker, but he was the first right-wing talker to attain superstar celebrity status. He was a wanna-be rock star who burned out with the same shooting star rapidity as a one-hit wonder. But the echoes of his loudmouth voice resonate today, and even though 17-year-old me was really into it, I see Downey’s influence as purely bad for America. Sadly, in spite of its chronological adulthood, the audience for Downey-style conservative punditry has yet to grow up.

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I’m old enough to remember when country singer Natalie Maines said during a Dixie Chicks concert, “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” She wasn’t broadcasting a political demand for impeachment or a half-baked conspiracy theory to anyone outside of the auditorium — no audiences of millions on AM radio or cable news. Just a few thousand people in a closed setting. But based on the bug-eyed, flag-molesting outrage that followed you’d think she had colluded with Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the ghost of Khrushchev to shank George W. Bush with a prison shiv. The nation exploded in a collective hissy fit that included a conga-line of scolding conservatives and more than a few witch-hunt style protests in which Dixie Chicks CDs were smashed by heavy machinery or burned, all to the tune of the familiar warning: don’t undermine the commander-in-chief or else.

And that was in March of 2003, years after the 9/11 attacks and long after the high-water mark of unwavering, luxuriant god-worship of George W. Bush.

In the days and months after 9/11, even hinting that Bush had acted poorly in the wake of the attacks or had perhaps not done enough to prevent them (he was warned — a lot) was immediately beaten down as unpatriotic or “with the terrorists.” The sentiment was universal. Democrats and Republicans alike agreed to lay off the president for a while, an attitude that definitely lasted for way too long and enabled a long list of craptastical laws that passed with unanimous bipartisan support — laws that we’re still trying to unravel today. It’s not a stretch to attribute this reaction to both Republican partisanship and jingoism and the strange Democratic psychosis involuntarily forcing them to be easily suckered into coitus with political enemies.

Conversely, none of the same courtesy has been extended to our current president following the Boston Marathon bombing. Not so shocking, considering how it likewise didn’t happen in the aftermath of the Great Recession, or after the killing of Bin Laden, or after the end of the Iraq War. It certainly didn’t happen following each of the various gun massacres — terrorist attacks at gunpoint. And, as we’re all aware, an outright conservative inquest was launched following the consulate attack in Benghazi, in spite of the fact that 11 similar attacks took place during the Bush years with considerably greater body counts.

Suffice to say, if another attack were to occur at or even below the level of September 11, this president would likely be impeached within a week.

Worse, the conspiracy theories first marketed by Alex Jones last week are being mainstreamed throughout the conservative entertainment complex. In the Bush post-9/11 context, imagine not only broad liberal and Democratic attacks against President Bush within a week of the attacks, but also the mainstreaming of the various 9/11 Truther conspiracies.

Both Alex Jones (naturally) and Sean Hannity launched a conspiracy theory by anti-Islam crackpot Steve Emerson involving the Obama administration’s alleged cover-up of the connection between the bombing and Saudi Arabia via the Saudi student who was questioned and released immediately following the marathon bombing.

On Friday, Glenn Beck said America should “demand impeachment” over the Saudi conspiracy theory.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) accused the president of “leading from behind.”

The Tea Party Nation not only suggested that the president was to blame for this attack, but he’s also to blame for the next attack which will happen “sooner than later.”

Fox & Friends co-host and miraculous talking monkey Brian Kilmeade said on his radio show, “So like it or not, this president has left [the Middle East] alone. And guess what happens? Now the IEDs are blowing up in our streets.” Yep, the Boston bombing was the president’s fault. 100 percent. Why? Because of the Middle East, even though the Tsarvaev’s are from, you know, Chechnya.

Rush Limbaugh attacked the president’s handling of the bombing by invoking Benghazi, the New Black Panthers (all two of them at that polling place in Philadelphia) and Rev. Wright of all people — all in the context of the Obama government’s refusal to tell the truth.

Former Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey attacked the president for apparently downplaying the motives of the Tsarnaev brothers, “There is also cause for concern in the president’s reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the ‘t’ word—terrorism—and in his vague musing on Friday about some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad.”

I think you get the idea. It’s been just over a week and all of the usual suspects are engaged in nonsense far worse than anything Natalie Maines ever said. In fact, I’m waiting for Dinesh D’Souza to release another movie about how the president’s “anti-colonialism” caused the bombing. Just wait another few days and it’ll be in wide release. Actually, I wouldn’t be shocked if the Republicans elevated the Saudi conspiracy theory into another Benghazi-style coverup plot.

It’s all yet another case study in how the Republicans too often comport themselves in the wake of a disaster — these self-proclaimed “patriots” are merely selective, fair-weather patriots, only willing to lend their unified support when the president is from their own party and prepared to bomb the hell out of brown people somewhere. They will not give an inch on anything. They will contradict themselves, ignore their own records, jump to paranoid conclusions, risk embarrassment and generally do whatever it takes to disrupt and sabotage the Obama presidency. And they’re willing to brazenly and unapologetically exploit these tragedies as a means of doing so.

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Time for Republicans to get rid of the Romneys and Trumps

By Ben Cohen: It’s fairly clear that the Republican Party is in a state of serious disarray after getting hammered in the general election. The once unified party has begun to crack at the seams, fracturing over issues that were once untouchable cornerstones of Republican ideology. Up for grabs are women’s rights, the environment, foreign policy and now even taxation. Which strand of Republicanism will define the future of the party? Will the hardliners – the libertarians, religious fundamentalists, and tea party activist win the day, or will moderates find a way to bring the party under control and present a more sensible brand of conservatism going forward?

One thing is clear – what they are doing now is not working, and it’s going to get much, much worse. They are facing a demographic nightmare and an evolving public consciousness that free market capitalism and tax cuts are not the solution to the nation’s woes. Republicans are going to have to think out of the box if they want long term electoral success, and many of their ideas won’t be popular.

While the Left should be happy that the Republicans are a mess, it isn’t good for democracy to have one party so removed from reality that there is little point engaging with them. So here are some suggestions for top brass at GOP central – a five step program to get their house in order and get back to being relevant in a rapidly changing country that is leaving them behind. The steps we’ve outlined won’t be easy to implement, but they are necessary if the Republicans want to attract top talent and capture the imagination of the public:

1. Publicly disown prominent media blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity. Moderate Republicans need to take control of the GOP messaging quickly and aggressively, and that begins with creating a very visible rift between the party and the Fox News propaganda complex. This will be extremely painful to do and the backlash will be vicious and prolonged. But Limbaugh et al. are paper tigers with no substance behind their rhetoric and Republicans will have to gamble that in the long term, honesty and reality will win. As Andrew Sullivan stated on Bill Maher’s ‘Real Time’, “The first conservative who will be the future of that [Republican] party will be the one who says Rush Limbaugh does not speak for the Republican Party, he is a poison on the discourse…..You see the media industrial complex on the right is so lucrative, they don’t want to lose him and it is now controlling a political party. That has to be severed, Fox News has to be demonized, has to be cut off.”

2. Join the President in opposing Citizens United. There are already signs that Republicans are aware of just how corrosive and dangerous the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was, and there needs to be a unified effort to reverse the decision and ban unlimited outside funding of political campaigns. As Jonathan Chait wrote during the Republican primary:

The Republican elite is justifiably terrified at the prospect of Newt Gingrich capturing the nomination. Gingrich, as I’ve argued, is riding the wave of revulsion and contempt for President Obama that this same Establishment has stoked for three years. But his campaign is also blowback to the party Establishment in another, more mechanical way. His campaign is surviving entirely as a result of the Citizens United ruling, decried by liberals and celebrated by conservatives, which allows unlimited campaign expenditures, as long as they’re not coordinated with campaigns.

Unlimited funding means that corporate interests will almost always win, or at least drag politics in a direction that works against the long term interests of the Republican Party. The GOP needs to change its economic platform if it wants to remain relevant because the era of Romney style vulture capitalism is getting increasingly harder to sell.

3. Use traditional Republicanism as the basis for a new economic ideology and completely disown Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Traditional conservatism doesn’t bow to markets – it believes in small government, but also believes in curtailing the power of big business. There is a Libertarian dictatorship within the Republican Party, and it has stifled debate making change almost impossible. Market fanaticism has ensured the party has had no new ideas in over 30 years, and this cannot go on. There are Republicans not wedded to the dictates of deregulated markets and they need to be given a more prominent platform. Joe Scarborough represents a type of conservatism that has been long dead in America and has the guts to actually tell the truth about who owns the party. We need to hear more from people like him.

4. Stop lying. The Republican Party has a terrible track record with telling the truth. Mitt Romney’s run at the Presidency exemplified modern Republican politics perfectly – it was based on lying about literally everything, from abortion to taxation and global warming. And in particular, Republicans have lied about President Obama. The Republicans have waged a completely dishonest campaign against the President, promoting an insidious mythology that he is some sort of closet communist Muslim who hates America. There are many, many issues that the President can be criticized for – drone killings, the NDAA, wire tapping, his ties to Wall st etc etc – all issues that true conservatives should be seriously concerned about. Instead, the Republican Party has created a make believe Obama and attacked that making them look idiotic in the process.

5. Embrace environmentalism. This could be key to redefining the Republican Party. It sounds far fetched and so contradictory to current Republicanism that dismisses global warming and regards environmentalists as subhuman (Ann Coulter once said, “The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours”), but it could capture an entire new demographic. There are non political Evangelical Christians who would line up behind them if they got serious, activists who would jump ship immediately if the Republicans outflanked the Democrats, and a new generation that is disenchanted with both parties inactivity on the issue.

Do you have any suggestions for the Grand Old Party, or do you think it best they stay confused and politically neutered? Comment below and we’ll post the best suggestions!

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Rush Limbaugh Cartoon by Ian D. Marsden of marsdencartoons.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: Listening to the Right wing fallout after President Obama was re-elected has been absolutely fascinating to say the least. From Karl Rove’s extraordinary meltdown live on election night to Sean Hannity’s one-eighty on immigration, it’s fair to say that the GOP is a party with an extreme identity problem. Most people in the party are aware that they have a huge, huge problem going forward – the population is changing in both color and culture, and they are fast becoming demographically irrelevant. If the Republicans want to have electoral success going forward, they are going to have to find a way to attract women, Latinos and African Americans – groups they lost in overwhelming fashion last week.

The problem is that the party is split into so many extreme factions that it will be close to impossible to unify the party under a new, more inclusive platform. The party is comprised of moderates, Libertarians and Tea Party activists, traditional conservatives, neo cons and evangelical Christians. And while there is considerable overlap, each group have their own objectives that are often at odds with each other. Hardcore conservatives don’t want more immigrants while libertarians and moderates understand the need for reform. Evangelicals will never accept gay marriage while moderates and libertarians would, neo cons want more wars, while traditional conservatives do not, and Libertarians vehemently oppose any tax hikes, while moderates understand it to be an occasional necessity.

Most worrying for the Republicans is the prominence of loudmouth media characters like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh – virulent conservatives who influence millions of voters with their fear mongering rhetoric. Without their stamp of approval, Republican candidates lose a vital marketing tool that can seriously affect voter turn out. Had Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin not gone out to bat for Mitt Romney, it’s likely his loss would have been even worse.

In the wake of defeat, the Right wing noise machine is still out in full force because it is not in the business of self reflection. It is in the business of fear and hate – two tried and tested ratings winners that may destroy the Republican Party, but keep the multimillionaire mega mouths on air for eternity.

Rush Limbaugh went on an epic rant after last Tuesday, sarcastically suggesting that Republicans should advocate pot legalization and start their own ‘abortion industry’. He said on his show:

The youth vote! I tell you what we should do, let’s announce, starting around Christmastime, so that we can get close to being Santa Claus ourselves, let’s announce that we are for the legalization of marijuana, and that as a party we’re in favor of forgiving all student loans . . . Is that how we do it?

All these examples . . . Latinos! We’re not going to get the Latino vote by opening the borders and saying, you know what? Let anybody in who wants to come in.

Women. Let’s start our own abortion industry. Let’s go out and get the women’s vote. I just want you to think, would that work?

Not exactly encouraging. And if you thought that was bad, Mark Levin, one of the most nauseating fear merchants had the following to say about the lessons the Right should take from electoral loss:

We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

We are the alternative. We will resist. We’re not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We’re not good losers, you better believe we’re sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we’re called ‘purists.’ Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We’re purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

This ‘purism’ is a recipe for complete disaster, and the sooner the GOP exiles braggarts like Limbaugh and Levin, the sooner it can reform itself into an electorally viable political party. The problem is, letting go of the extremists means taking considerable short term losses. Republicans draw huge support from fearful white Americans who believe they are in imminent danger from marauding Mexicans, gay couples and black Muslims. They are a reliable voting bloc, and losing their enthusiasm would be very detrimental. Their economic platform has to change too – it can no longer be the party of tax cuts and deregulation at all costs – they are no longer trusted to run the economy and their inability to evolve on the issue is becoming a serious electoral burden. Again, the problem is that changing their economic principles would mean massive short term losses. The party is essentially a mouthpiece for big business, and big businesses want tax cuts. Without big business, there is no money to win elections, making it a hit the party cannot afford.

Is there a way out of this conundrum?

Frankly, it’s hard to envision one. The reforms needed will be incredibly painful and will entail some very serious action from prominent Republicans who will have to confront the militants in the party. Tokenism won’t do going forward – the changes will have to be wide reaching and meaningful – and much of the party will hate them. The Republicans will have to redefine conservatism and market it to the new America. We’ve yet to see any evidence that there is serious intention from party members to do so, making their prospects for 2016 all the dimmer.

In short, they’re screwed, and there’s not much they can do about it.

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By Chez Pazienza: I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but Rush is right.

Yesterday in my regular column here, I mentioned how the right-wing media isn’t simply circling the wagons to defend Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments regarding 47% of the country, they’re actually going on the offensive and rallying loudly behind him and his willingness to acknowledge what they see as an epic struggle for the soul of America. Romney shocked a lot of people by basically putting Americans into two classes, divided almost equally, then throwing half of them under the bus, saying that the portion of the nation he can’t be bothered to care about is made up of victims and those who believe that they’re entitled to government handouts and who’ll vote for Barack Obama no matter what. Yes, it’s drawn all kinds of vitriol from most sane, not-sociopathic Americans who don’t consider themselves freeloaders and who certainly don’t see their financial troubles during the Wall Street-engineered Great Recession as an indictment of their character. But not everyone thinks that Romney’s unfiltered moment of channeling Ayn Rand in front of a group of millionaires is a fatal curse on his campaign. In fact, they see it as a blessing — one not even in disguise.

As Rush Limbaugh puts it, this little accident — the one that many say has put the final nail in the Romney campaign’s coffin — is actually a “golden opportunity.”

And he’s right. It is. Not simply for conservatives but for everyone — every American voter.

Limbaugh’s claim is not only that Mitt Romney is right in his assessment that there’s a steadily growing “taker” class in this country which is content to sit on its ass and leech off the supposed hard work of the “makers,” but that it’s an argument that should’ve been front-and-center in the presidential race from the very beginning. In the minds of Limbaugh and the rest of the far-right, the only thing stopping the rallying cry of the resentful from being shouted from the rooftops has been a lack of balls on the part of Romney, who obviously and somewhat wisely considered such stridency to be politically toxic. But now, thanks to Romney being forced out into the open and put in a position where he really has no choice but to cop to what he espouses when he thinks the cameras are off, the most important debate to be had in this election is actually possible. The far-right never wanted to see Romney run on the platform of being Republican X, basically a generic alternative to Barack Obama; it wanted an actual battle of ideals, which is why so many conservative mouthpieces pissed themselves with joy when Romney chose Randian Superman Paul Ryan as his running mate, then reacted with outrage and exasperation when the campaign neutered him right out of the gate.

Now, at long last, thanks to the actions of someone who had nothing at all to do with wanting to see Mitt Romney elected president, they have the fight to the death they’ve longed for, because now Romney has to run as what he is: an unapologetic multi-millionaire who thinks that a lack of wealth directly correlates to laziness and who believes that any form of government assistance merely perpetuates the nanny state and encourages poor people to stay poor. He’s a guy who believes that naked, unchecked greed is never a bad thing and certainly isn’t to blame for the mess we’re currently in. Like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, Limbaugh and his ilk are seizing the opportunity, now that the bombers are already in the air and the wheels are in motion, to go ahead and do what they’ve always wanted to anyway: nuke their enemy.

The only problem is this: What happens if Romney throws off all caution and flies the flag of callous modern conservatism high for the next month and a half — then loses anyway? Despite it having been the glorious battle of political philosophies the right has wished for over the past several years, will Limbaugh and the like be willing to acknowledge that they lost because Americans soundly rejected their conservative ideals, or will they, ironically, retreat to a position of blaming the man rather than the message? Will they simply argue that Romney, northeastern RINO wimp that he is, wasn’t the right vessel to carry their water? That he wasn’t enough of a True Believer? I can’t imagine the far-right being willing to admit that it’s wrong and that the American people simply don’t want what it’s offering and don’t accept its vision for the country. If anything, more and more I can’t see the Republican party responding to a loss in any way other than to track even farther to the right, to dig in their heels and refuse to submit or even compromise. Because guys like Limbaugh are never wrong. They can’t be wrong.

As it turns out, though, he’s not wrong about at least one thing: Whether Romney wanted it or not, we’ve now been given a very clear choice this November.

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