I didn’t click the stopwatch, but I estimate the duration of time during which Republicans were engaged in deep and serious reflection over the reasons for their 2012 electoral gutting clocked in at around four minutes. Time flies when it isn’t really much time at all. Frankly, I had few illusions about prospective evolutionary advancement on the Republican right. Deep introspection just isn’t in the nature of batshit.

In fairness, there have been tribunes of saneness in the conservative thinking class but they continue to falter against a brick wall of obdurate ideological wiggery and a Republican Party wedded to screwy dogma and impulsively belligerent toward enormous swaths of the country. Far from persuaded that appealing to a changing electorate or revamped ideas are the way to proceed, Republicans in places like Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, battleground states that incidentally Romney lost, have begun proposing monkeying around with the way in which their states assign electoral votes.

The brainiacs of sore loserdom have come up with the wretchedly odoriferous ruse of throwing away the practice of assigning all the electoral votes in their states to the candidate who wins the majority of votes, majority rule apparently having become tiresome as the majority increasingly hates your guts.  Instead, electoral votes would be assigned on the basis of which candidate carries congressional districts, districts conveniently, not coincidentally, that have been gerrymandered to favor Republicans. Said gerrymandering is the reason that while Democrats received a majority of votes for the House of Representatives in the last election Republicans retained control.

This is one way to control a country while retaining the luxury of publically expressing disdain for a considerable majority of its citizens. It isn’t too democratic, but neither is the hegemony of a wealthy and corporate elite for which this party spends all of its waking hours insuring. Part of the same project of democratic evasion was the law Republican legislators sneaked to a vote and passed in stealth making Michigan a “right-to-work” state, in other words crippling the political leverage of labor unions, financially hammering their members and suppressing the wages of every worker in the state. If the goal was to give the middle finger to the middle class and to reiterate Republicans’ disdain for it and for economic fairness of any kind this was a stellar move. A rededication to finding new ways to appeal to voters and reduce the insularity of Republican politics to majority sentiment it was not.  So much for the Republican Era of Introspection, all 240 seconds worth.

And then you have Republican members of congress, who will be forced to yield on the “fiscal cliff,” now threatening to throw the nation into default again in spring unless the safety net is ripped to bits and pieces. Watching Republicans chase after Medicare and Social Security with a tire iron so soon after the last election when they pretended to deeply care about them reminds one that talk of Republican reform and rejuvenation aside, sometimes assholes simply can’t rehabilitate.