The Takers take it back.

You don't have to have sensational hearing to hear the rustling in the woodwork as the reshuffling of the Republican hierarchy begins. The opening move for the hopefuls is to distance themselves from Mitt Romney and his sour grapes and his nonsense about Democrats having bought the election by giving gifts and his outright lies about half of us not paying taxes. "We have to stop being the stupid party" says Bobby Jindal and somewhere can't we hear a small voice crying "bingo?"  Let's hope it's the end of that error foretold in the gospel of the bumper sticker.

Making up a fake Obama, fabricating facts, cobbling together stereotypes about "Liberals" and using them like pawns to play fantasy chess with -- raging about God being against birth control, calling women sluts for wanting to have non-reproductive sex, insulting gay people, insulting immigrants of color, 10th generation Americans of color, using God's name in vain to back their every prejudice and snarling hate and all their ignorance. Nobody, particularly the struggling citizens working two jobs if they can find them and trying to keep a roof over their heads, likes to be told they're a "taker" a parasite by some silver spoon aristocrat. Nobody likes waking up and finding out he's been taken for a fool.

They've been the party of Stupid for a long time and more so for thinking it wouldn't end badly. The anti-science party. The delusional party, the party that shouts down the truth and punishes the truth tellers. The anti-education party, the contempt for women party. Perhaps you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, but you can't do it forever by belittling them, insulting them and telling lies without bothering to think some people might remember what you said last week or last year to a different audience. Fox news can only cover it up for so long. They can and did rave for hours about how women aren't put off by the war on planned parenthood, the rhetoric about legitimate rape and God's will that they give birth to a rapist's baby, but there's a limit to the effectiveness of telling women what their opinion actually is.

Telling  people who know damn well that they pay 28% of their income in taxes that they're not paying any taxes while Mitt himself pays 14% on the income we know about and refuses to disclose his tax returns. Telling Chrysler execs they're going to move the Jeep Division to China, telling millions of auto workers their jobs should have been trashed. Missing the point that selling billions of dollars worth of cars to China is a good thing - an essential thing. Telling us that high taxes cause recessions when taxes are at the lowest in a lifetime and our best years featured much higher taxes. Most of all letting people suspect that to the GOP Brahmans, we all exist on their sufferance and Noblesse oblige.
 The question remains -- how are they going to do it?  Or perhaps rather, the question is whether they're actually going to do more than look for a better salesman to market the same old platform.  How can they not be the stupid party while selling a failed economic plan?  While basing their vision on a tendentious work of fiction. Are they going to admit that 99.7% of climatologists aren't part of a liberal conspiracy or that we need regulation if we don't want oil platforms to blow up and poison the Gulf?  Are they finally going to examine the Bush legacy and accept blame for having ignored the warnings and shut down the anti-terrorism efforts right before 9/11? Admit that markets aren't perfect self regulators and that private insurers do have death panels and don't provide the best coverage to the most people at the lowest cost? Are they going to stop blaming the colossal Bush era borrowing and spending on Obama?

Fuhgettabout it!  It ain't gonna happen and if we relax and buy into it and think we've won at last, we're the stupid party.