1. The Republican Party suffered a death blow.
2. A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory.
3. Now that they control the White House and Congress, Democrats will usher in a new progressive era.
4. A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year.
5. McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin.
Yes, yes I know -- I'm sure to get pouty stampy e-mails from libertarian types nibbling around the edges of straw men versions of the contrary claims to these wish-fulfillment fantasies, just as I'm sure to get castigatory e-mails from my more radical left friends begging me not to get complacent or wondering if I'm suddenly in the tank with mushy corporatist Dems.
But, people, people, step back and get a glimpse of the big picture here. There is simply no good news for Republicans this year, and -- far better still -- there is no good news either for the corporate-militarist ideology that has fueled Movement Republicanism as the ruling ideology of the last quarter-century.
Funny, but Cillizza's "Myth Busting" is all about spreading the good news for Republicans and incumbent ideology at the very moment when History has handed them their hats.
It is obviously true and it obviously matters that the Republican Party and the market fundamentalist, neocon, theocon ideologies that have driven it met for the first time in a generation with an explicit resistance and a decisive defeat. It is obviously true and it obviously matters that a long complacent diverse electorate was energized to come to the polls and voted for change. It is obviously true and it obviously matters that people who want to end the occupation, make health care a right, make abortion safe and legal, end our dependence on oil and halt catastrophic climate change, invest in infrastructure, tax the richest of the rich and provide support for everyone now control every branch of government at every level of government. It is obviously true and it obviously matters that despite the enormity of our problems and the utter bankruptcy of conservative ideology, Republicans could have won the Presidency if Democrats had made the choice -- John Edwards, say -- of a competent candidate unfortunate enough to be vulnerable to the shabby superficial scandalmongery and flabbergasting irresposibility of our corporate-militarist media. It is obviously true and it obviously matters that the rifts in the current Republican party in the aftermath of their achieving the power to do everything they wanted with the result of producing -- by all available metrics, foreign, domestic, fiscal, popular -- the worst, most catastrophic Administration in living memory, and confronted with their always fragile now tattered alliance of embattled Christianist cultural reactionaries and embattled corporatist social reactionaries, they were forced against the obviously better judgment of their own candidate to embrace a palpably unprepared disaster of a vice-president who appealed to the Base enough to hide for a few week's time just how terminal the Party's current incarnation truly is.
These are not myths -- even if one can prune and polish these obvious truths that obviously matter into less plausibly hyperbolic variations -- but facts of life.
But tap, tap, tap go the snide dishonest annoying demoralizing little hammers of incumbency at the hopes of those who want change.
Don't fall for it.
But by all means do read it. It's good for a laugh.
And one hopes many Republicans will read these "demythifications" as well, and take a measure of warm comfort in them... and hence remain in stubborn unelectable denial long enough to stay out of the way while the rest of us clean up their stupid mess and make the world a little bit better a place to live in.
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