Tea Party Learns Its Painful Electoral Lesson: That Mitt Romney Was Too Moderate

It is so much fun to watch the Party of Personal Responsibility point fingers and self-implode, isn't it? It certainly is! Today's finger-pointing blame-game session comes courtesy the Tea Party, which has engaged in about a week of sober reflection and concluded that the GOP lost because Mitt was too moderate. No, really:

Tea party supporters are angry at the GOP for embracing as its presidential nominee a "moderate" like Romney. For undermining "true conservative" candidates. And for "choosing to ignore" the conservative agenda.

After we are all done laughing at the absurdity of this assessment, let's think about what this really means. It means that, to Tea Partiers, a pro-lifer who supports a personhood amendment is a moderate. A fiscal conservative who wants to eradicate FEMA is a moderate. If this is a moderate, we're morbidly curious as to what a True Conservative looks like. But anyway, the Tea Party wants everyone in charge of the GOP to quit because they are incompetent buffoons, and we agree with that, but a stopped clock is right twice a day so we aren't putting too much stock in it.

Wednesday, the political direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie gathered a group of disenchanted conservatives for a news conference in Washington. Calling Romney's loss "the death rattle" of the GOP, Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com...called upon the Republican leadership to resign for its part in the "epic election failure of 2012."

[...]

"In any logical universe," Viguerie said, "establishment Republican consultants such as Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie and Romney campaign senior advisors Stuart Stevens and Neil Newhouse would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again and no one would give a dime to their ineffective 'super PACs.'"

Yes, but the Party of Personal Responsibility doesn't ever TAKE personal responsibility, because Personal Responsibility is for Sluts and Poors. It is not for the likes of KARL ROVE, duh, or for the Establishment, which is in turn blaming the Tea Party et al. for GOP losses last week:

Viguerie's attack didn't sit well with many mainline Republicans, who blamed conservative "purists" and the tea party wing of the party for squandering the GOP's chance to regain control of the Senate.

Friday, for instance, conservative columnist Michael Barone told an audience at Hillsdale College's center in Washington that the tea party, while bringing some talented politicians to the fore, also brought some "wackos and weirdos and witches."

In a video of his comments, posted on the Daily Caller website, he singled out the GOP's losing Senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana — Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock — who he said committed "unforced errors" with their remarks against abortion cases of rape. "Don't nominate dogs, OK?," he said.

Shhh. Nobody tell Michael Barone but these "wackos" and "weirdos" and "witches," including Akin and Mourdock, were simply toeing the Republican party platform, which calls for a Personhood Amendment. The logical consequence of that amendment would be to deny rape victims the right to abortion, so we're not sure what the problem is here. Other than the fact that these "wackos" and "weirdos" and "witches" made the mistake of saying what so many of them think. But you know who can fix all of this is a union-leader-turned-President who raised taxes 11 times while he was in office , ratified a UN Convention on torture , expanded Social Security , and funded Planned Parenthood:  

At Viguerie's news conference, Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, one of the country's largest tea party groups, said conservatives had wanted a candidate like President Reagan. "What we got was a weak moderate candidate handpicked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party. The presidential loss is unequivocally on them," she said.

 [LA Times]