Rolling in the schadenfreude

By Mustang Bobby and Michael J.W. Stickings 

MB:

Josh Marshall at TPM has a handy guide of all those folks who got their long-due comeuppance  and those who won against the efforts of the Orcosphere in the election. From Karl Rove to Donald Trump and gay rights to bong hits, there's plenty of schadenfreude to share with your coffee.

For me, the best was the flaming explosion of Karl Rove's head on live TV when Fox News announced that Obama had won the election:

In an epic on-air tantrum, he refused to acknowledge Obama had won, sending anchor Megyn Kelly walking off-set to ask the network's vote analysts to explain for him why tipping point Ohio was lost to Romney. Democrats will be replaying this clip for years to cheer them up in their darker moments.

Now he has to explain to the billionaires why their unprecedented spending earned them — nothing. For all the money spent, there's still a Democratic president and, almost as unbelievably, a net gain in the Senate.

Heh. The best part is that if you enjoy this sort of thing, none of these people are going to go away. It is completely against their nature to retreat quietly once they've had their ass handed to them because they never, ever learn. So count on them being around for a long time.

Bonus: Go watch Jon Stewart assess the election. (Go here if you're in Canada.)

MJWS:

I agree with MB. It was awesome television and so thoroughly enjoyable watching the Fox News propagandists wallowing in their misery and denial. Here's what I wrote at the time:

11:53 pm - Karl Rove, a Fox News contributor and also one of Romney's biggest bankrollers (in terms of outside Super PAC support) is telling his network to rescind the call on Ohio.

Crazy, eh? This is what conservatism has become. This is the face of the Republican Party.

Extremism, denialism, obstructionism -- and as Rachel [Maddow] is pointing out, this is just like the Republican opposition to basic facts, to math. They are completely blinded by ideology and partisanship.

They are anti-democratic, anti-American, and anti-Enlightenment, and what they want to take us back to is the darkness of the Middle Ages.

12:08 am - I agree with Ed Schultz to a point that this refusal to concede is a power play by the Republicans.

This is not to say the Romney campaign isn't in denial. At the end of a long campaign that you thought you could win, it's hard to let it go, to give up, to admit defeat. And of course the various wackos on Fox News are in denial, too. They just can't accept that Obama has won, not the Kenyan-Indonesian socialist they think is the worst thing ever to happen to America. But part of what's going on here, and it's been going on for a while now, is a concerted campaign of de-legitimization (or illegitimization) of the president. By talking up voter fraud (against all the evidence that it's not a significant problem) and suggesting that Obama and the Dems somehow stole the election, they're hoping to create a narrative for Obama's second term, one they'll try to hammer home again and again over the next four years.

And before you tell me that Dems did the same thing to Bush after the 2000 election, let me just say that that was completely different. In that case, the Republican-leaning Supreme Court stepped in and stopped a recount in Florida and might have found Gore to have been the winner of the election. It wasn't about Gore winning the popular vote nationally, it was about the Court handing the election to Bush. And even then, Democrats stopped challenging Bush pretty quickly. Yes, 9/11 happened, and the country rallied behind Bush for a time, but even before then voices saying Bush was and illegitimate president were isolated on the left-wing fringe and not accepted within the Democratic mainstream.

The campaign against Obama that we've witnessed the last four years and that will continue over the next four is very much a central part of the Republican Party and everything it stands for. And what we're witnessing tonight from the likes of Karl Rove is both more of the same and a call to arms for Republicans in Obama's second term.

Yes, it's that ugly. Yes, the Republican Party is that vicious and malevolent.