Stay classy, Republicans

Image via The Guardian.

If GOP plays this politically smart they can end any chance that the Dems win the WH in 2016. War is politics carried on by other means.

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) November 14, 2015

They can wait if they like until next November for the actual balloting, but Donald Trump was elected president tonight.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 14, 2015

It's certainly true that terrorism has sometimes been great for Republican poll numbers. Who can forget what happened to George W. Bush's ratings in September 2001?

Via Gallup.

In fact maybe you guys ought to tone that down, given this week's report in Politico on how much the CIA knew in spring 2001 about the coming attacks, and how the Bush administration decided to ignore their warnings. Somebody might start wondering if they ignored the threat—

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

—merely because they were stupid, as we've always thought, or because they hoped to profit from it. "Play this politically smart," Sheriff Clarke.

A sour, overgeneralized, and intellectually sloppy sense of alienation

Edwin Levick, immigrants on Atlantic liner ca. 1906, Library of Congress, via Smithsonian Institution.

David Brooks writes ("The American Idea and Today's G.O.P.", New York Times, September 25 2015):

One of the exceptional things about American exceptionalism is the exceptionalism of American conservatism. While conservatives in other countries are essentially reactionary, yearning for an idealized past, American conservatives are retroactionary, afflicted with a nostalgia for an endlessly receding future. This goes back to the very beginnings, when those who settled, founded, and built America, not necessarily in that order, understood that our country had no history, and that only by forging a path into the future would we be able to acquire some.

Single women look at the government as their husbands

Ann Coulter (via Asshole of the Day):

“By the way, Republicans don’t have a problem with women,” Coulter opined. “They have a problem with unmarried women who think, ‘No, we don’t need national defense, we need our birth control paid for.’”

“And why? Because single women look at the government as their husbands,” she added. “Please provide for me, please take care of me.”

Wikipedia:

Coulter has been engaged several times, but never married.

Now we know that's not exactly true! She's been sort of married the whole time.