open letter to the republican party strategists

dear republican party strategists,

i am not writing this to gloat over election results.

okay, i am writing to gloat a little.

but only because against advice you decided to hand over a perfectly good political party to a bunch of ravening whack-a-doodles.

but here's the thing i want to talk with you about: you all seemed mystified- completely baffled by your losses in the recent elections and i heard more than one republican analyst tell us confidently that it was going to be an awesome win for you because america just doesn't have any self-identified liberals anymore and that everyone is all conservative and everything.

i heard more than one of you shake you head in disbelief as election returns trickled in. "how could this happen?" you asked each other. "there are no liberals out there".

well, there's no point in you acting all surprised about it. i think you created this problem yourself.

d'ya remember all those years when you started heaving the word "liberal" around like it was a word that meant at worst "traitorous baby-killing godless foreigner" and at best "loserly soft-in-the-head patsy"?

do you remember making the word an epithet so extreme that perfectly good liberals elbowed each other in the face while trying to dodge out of the way and call themselves something else?

people mostly didn't change their way of thinking; they just used different labels, labels that were more difficult for you to group together and track.

so when you called up random americans and asked them if the were conservatives or liberals and they understood you were asking are you conservatives or are you addlepated losers, very few people jumped up to say they were addlepated losers.

here's where you made your mistake, though: you believed your new polling data.

you redefined the labels and then you fell victim to your own backspin and believed poll results based on your stigmatized definition.

you can't use polling as both spin and information gathering. if you try to do that and you end up with bad information, there's no point acting all surprised about it later.

sorry about that.

love,
flask