I like a occasionally rant. Came across a good one by Noemie Emery in the Washington Examiner titled “Excuses, excuses from the conservative wing”:
At CPAC last week we noticed Rick Perry saying the Republicans lost in 2012 because their nominee wasn’t conservative, which one must say was quite rich. And why was the nominee not a conservative? Perhaps because Perry failed.
He came into the primaries a governor of a large state, with an excellent record, a “big” personality, a reputation as a ferocious campaigner, and for some reason bombed quickly, leaving Mitt Romney the last sane man standing in a field of conservatives whose credentials were lacking and whose personalities verged on bizarre.
and
When things worked less well for conservatives who lacked Reagan’s luck and his genius, they decided their failure was explainable only by sabotage — after all, how else could they lose? On the way, the Right developed a sense of entitlement (the Republican Party owed them a nominee of their liking); an embrace of victimhood; a habit of translating their tactical failure to win over more voters into a moral failure on the part of those voters for not sensing their value; and a belief that they can manage to win more elections by purging all factions (and people) not wholly in sync with their views.
This isn’t the outlook with which Reagan won landslides. The GOP owes conservatives nothing beyond a chance and a hearing. The onus is on them to win over the voters. They are victims of nothing beyond their own much-too-high self-esteem.
