I don't normally do this, but I was checking to see how many wingnuts actually have the last name "Horowitz" and I found this diary (isn't it cute how they imitate us) from Erick Erickson hisself:
It Is Time to Throw the Social Conservatives Out of the GOP
Of course, this isn't what he means, but since I wrote about Peter LaBarbera yesterday, who blamed the passage of the marriage initiatives on the squishy (my word) Republicans who didn't fight hard enough against them, I figure this may be Erickson going after the NO on Marriage Equality people.
Only I think I have that wrong too:
What’s really going on here is that the people who voted Republican, but who disagree with pro-lifers and defenders of marriage, have decided it must be those issues. They can’t see how what happened actually happened unless it happened because the issues on which they disagree with the base played a role.
Some African Americans and some Latino/as DID vote for Romney, he writes, and they did so because they couldn't
vote for the party of killing kids and gay marriage.
Besides, some of these people (I'm thinking he means Latino/as who call themselves "Hispanics") are some of the most conservative voters in the country, he says.
The problem was the candidate. I wonder which of the other members of the clown car Erickson thought would have done better. And then he gets REALLY loony.
You may mentally decide, to escape having to deal with the other implications of this election, that if only the GOP would abandon its social conservatism it would do better. But if you do, go find yourself a new coalition because you won’t have half the votes the GOP has now. Good luck with that. In fact, if the GOP really wanted to expand with minorities, it’d keep the social conservatism and throw out the fiscal conservatism.
Richard Mourdock is his poster boy for why that's true. I guess Erickson didn't like his references to God!
It turns out Erickson is REALLY talking about LaBarbera. As you remember, La Barbera said it was the fact Republicans didn't turn out to vote against the marriage initiatives that allowed them to pass. Erickson thinks LaBarbera has his head up his whatever, although he agrees someone in his party wasn't fighting to stop marriage equality.
The problem is not social conservatism. The problem is social conservatives have gotten so used to thinking of themselves as the majority they’ve forgotten how to speak to those who are not and defend against those who accuse them of being fringe, most particularly the press. Couple that with Mitt Romney’s campaign making a conscious decision to not fight back on the cultural front and you have a bunch of Republicans convinced, despite the facts, that if only the social conservatives would go away all would be fine.
No, we NEED the social conservatives for the body count. That's the only reason why.
I keep using this song, from 1963, to explain what's going on here. Who knew it would take 50 years to come true.
9:19 AM PT: The comments at RedState are funny. The great majority (there's 202 of them at this writing) are mostly saying it's Romney's fault, but there are a few of the Bobby Jindal! Ted Cruz! Marco Rubio! nature. Next Republican campaign: TOKENISM.