Because you're wrong

Nothing is more important for conservative writers, in its current situation, than to correctly analyze the causes that led the Republican Party from the triumphant heights of 2002-04 to the abysmal defeats of 2006-08.

In a post Saturday evening, I explained that I am currently reading The Thumpin', Naftali Bendavid's account of the 2006 mid-term election in which Democrats reclaimed the majority they'd lost in 1994. I'm a fast reader.

The facts of that election are at odds with the explanations offered by those Republicans who say that the fundamental problem currently facing the GOP is that the party is "too far right," that it is too beholden to the Religious Right, or that the party has suffered for the "mean-spirited" rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, etc.

These analyses conflict with the facts of what happened in 2006. The public expression of these mistaken analyses by soi-dissant "conservatives" or self-identified Republicans are therefore not merely useless for the immediate task of the GOP -- regaining seats in the 2010 mid-term election -- but are in fact harmful to the efforts of those who are laboring toward that task.

Whatever the relevance of intramural ideological disputes (or concern about the tone and content of the GOP "message") to the current situation, henceforth propagation of false understanding by Republican commentators must be identified and denounced as nothing but what it is: Aid and comfort to the Democrats in the electoral showdown that is now less than 18 months away.

Many of the readers and commenters at The Other McCain are also bloggers, and therefore I ask that they join me in enforcing this policy. The 11th Commandment was never intended to be a shield behind which cowardly fools could hide in safety, merely because they had an "R" beside their names or declare that they are loyal Republicans.

Defeatist rhetoric and mistaken analyses offered by "Republicans," tending to impugn, demoralize and confuse the conservative grassroots, can only be considered as objectively pro-Democrat. Such incorrect understandings of the political situation cannot be ignored, but must be actively repudiated. Idiots have the right to free speech, and we have the right to call them idiots.