(The Root) — "We need to stop, take a deep breath and learn," said Newt Gingrich on Monday's Today show on NBC when discussing what the Republican Party should do next after suffering the shellacking it received in the 2012 election.
"I was wrong," Gingrich pointed out as he also pointed out that all major Republicans were wrong about the election. He said that the party needs to take six months to figure out what happened. Some pundits are blaming the conservative-media bubble for the beat-down conservatives received.
Apparently, everyone is to blame for the failure of the Republicans to take the White House and the Senate except Republicans themselves.
Conservative media aren't to blame for Republicans being completely out of touch with the rest of America. While Fox News, the Drudge Report and others absolutely do mislead, deceive and on occasion stick their fingers in their ears as they yell lies at the top of their lungs, you can't blame them for the Republican Party. I've watched the same conservative media (because I'm a masochist), and I've thought to myself, "Well, that doesn't make sense." But somehow the rest of the Republican Party doesn't have that ability?
Could we stop photoshopping history until at least six months to a year after the history occurred? Is "Obama" Kenyan for "instant amnesia"?
Conservatives just three to four weeks ago decided that polls across the country were all biased against them. They were so persecuted that they couldn't get any real data! Conservatives believed that the unemployment report that dropped to 7.8 percent was a deep Democratic conspiracy — that the numbers were cooked because the country couldn't possibly be doing any better. Conservatives decided that America hates Obamacare, all while millions said that they did like it and wished it went further.
The Republican Party has no one to blame but itself. Stop trying to find out what went wrong. Conservatives went wrong. They preached a message of lies. I'm not even adding a rhetorical flourish to that — it was an actual message of lies.
Mitt Romney and a bevy of high-profile Republicans yelled over and over that President Obama gutted the work from "work to welfare." When it was explained ad nauseam that this was a lie, Republicans and conservative media continued to say this nonsense because the facts had a liberal bias.
The Republican National Convention had an entire night when the theme was based on an out-of-context quote by the president. The Republicans' best and brightest all hit the stage parroting the "You didn't build this" narrative that they thought would be a winning meme. This was not the conservative media — this was the Republican Party embracing the very caricature that you'd think its members would want to fight against: actively and maliciously misleading the American public to vote against its own interest.
And those on the right who didn't buy into the ridiculousness didn't make anywhere near enough noise. So now your entire belief system has been branded by Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.
Man, I can't imagine why conservatives are so disconnected with reality.
The idea that Republicans stand here confused and still a bit in shock a week after President Obama's re-election is the best argument against American exceptionalism that I've ever seen.
Elon James White is a writer and satirist and host of the award-winning video and radio series This Week in Blackness. Listen Monday to Thursday at 1:30 p.m. EST at TWIB.FM and watch at TV.TWIB.ME/LIVE. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr.