Last Call

Pajamas Media columnist John Hawkins is delusional.

Too often today, liberals are using below-the-belt tactics against conservatives and paying no price whatsoever. Meanwhile, those on the right like to pat themselves on the back for being above it all. This is like a boxer priding himself on never taking off his gloves while his opponent nearly beats him to death with his bare firsts. But in the end, there’s not much to be said for lovable losers. Conservatives should realize that fair play isn’t going to pay any dividends.

While we conservatives don’t have to stoop quite as low as the left has, we do need to start giving them a taste of their own medicine, if only to make them think twice about the way they’re treating our side.

For example, look at the media jihad that was shamelessly launched against Sarah Palin’s family. There was a not-so-subtle message being sent: if you’re a Republican woman, you better stay in the shadows or we’re going to destroy your family to get you. The left gave the same kind of intrusive, public scrutiny to “Joe the Plumber,” a private citizen who merely asked an inconvenient question to Barack Obama. While conservatives defended both Sarah and Joe as we complained incessantly about the way they were treated, the reality is that the Democrats paid no price whatsoever for the out-of-bounds attacks.

Instead of continuing to complain, here’s a better idea. Why don’t conservatives do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber? Have they ever been arrested? Whom do they own property with? Have they ever been paid to do a speech for someone and then run a favorable news story about him? Certainly Keith Olbermann’s personal life is just as newsworthy as Joe the Plumber’s, and the details of Maureen Dowd’s life are just as noteworthy as those of Bristol Palin — are they not?

Yes. That's right folks. The GOP only lost because of the unfair media treatment of Sarah Palin and Joe The Plumber, asking the prospective Vice-President out-of-bounds foreign policy questions like "Do you believe in the Bush Doctrine?" and asking a prospective plumber the hideously inappropriate "Are you actually a licensed plumber in the state of Ohio?"

Republicans don't understand that the reason they lost is given a chance to actually govern the country, they turned America into a third-world country with a third-world junta running the place and refused to take any responsibility for any of it, much less made any attempt to do anything to fix the f'ckin problem.

The simple reality is not a single Republican has stood up and said "We screwed up. We screwed up badly, we're big enough to admit we screwed up badly, so now we're asking your help to fix the problem. The problem is very large and will take all of us to fix it."

Instead, it's everyone's fault but your own. It's the media's fault. It's the netroots' fault. It's the blacks' fault, or the Hispanics, or the gays, or poor people, or the younger generation, or the women, or the atheists, or the Muslims, or anybody's fault but the Republican Party's fault. Your solution to the problem is "We were not evil enough."

The GOP will never recover until it admits that it caused this mess with the same failed policies that they are trying to double down with now.

In other words, take some responsibility.

Until you do that, you are irrelevant. Step aside. The rest of us have a mess to clean up.