Every now and then when I find myself awake at 4 am, I have what, at the time, appears to be a genius level breakthrough. In the cold light of day, these moments often revel themselves to be half formed rambling nonsense. But this time I feel like I have something and I have to share it.

What if we’re reading the GOP completely wrong? Anyone who has read the site consistently, or even inconsistently, knows that the GOP has gone over the deep end. I’ve argued, I hope persuasively, for several years elsewhere, that the GOP, because of a functional hatred of President Obama – you fill in the reason why, my personal favorite is race – has been willing to destroy America in order to sabotage his administration. First it was trying to make him a one term president. Now it seems to be just cowardly, dishonorable, bullshit, that doesn’t even make sense come four o’clock in the morning.

But I wondered tonight, as I kicked back at 4 am and turned on sport center’s Super Bowl preview, whether the real issue weren’t race alone, but rather a massive inferiority complex. Look, I’m not an athlete; I don’t even play one on TV. But I grew up in a household and family of Division I players. I know swagger when I see it, and what I see coming out of the GOP since Obama took their lunch money in the first term, is a group of men and women who have no swagger.

Oh, they pretend to a swagger they do not possess. They bluster, they bullshit, they bully. But none of that is actual swagger. President Obama explaining to Mitt Romney, “We also have fewer horses and bayonets,” or that “We have these things that float on the surface of the ocean called Aircraft Carriers, planes land on them, and we have ships that go under the water called nuclear submarines.” That’s swagger. The GOP ain’t got it. Any of it.
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