Michael Tomasky on the Coming Post-Election GOP Freak Out

by Michael Tomasky Nov 4, 2012 4:45 AM EST

If Romney loses on Tuesday, watch for the right’s outrage machine to kick into high gear.

What's the state of mind this weekend of the conservative outrage machine? With regard to liberals, I think it's fair to say as of Saturday that most of us (excepting your allowed-for percentage of nervous nellies) expect Barack Obama to win. If he somehow doesn't, we'll be surprised and deeply depressed. But provided the outcome doesn't involve some kind of Florida-style shenanigans, in a couple days' time, we'll come to terms with it.

Meanwhile--conservatives? I think that they are certain that Mitt Romney will win and that all information to the contrary is a pack of lies; that they will be completely shocked and outraged if he doesn't; that, if he loses, it will be the inevitable product of foul play; and that therefore they'll immediately start scouring the landscape looking for parties to blame and will keep themselves in a state suspended agitation for...days, weeks, four years, forever. Which wouldn't matter to the rest of us but for the fact that they'll continue to have the power to screw up the country.

The conservatives I read, and certainly my conservative commenters, just can't wait for Tuesday, when the American people will arise out of their torpor and finally send Obama to the dugout. I'm continually struck--nay, impressed, even--by the iron certainty with which they say this, and by their unswerving ability to pluck out the favorable polls (getting fewer and farther between, incidentally) and throw a bucket of ice-cold water on the ones they don't like.

Objective reality says Obama is ahead. But to conservatives, there's always something wrong in objective-reality land, always a reason to claim that the world is in fact spinning in the opposite direction. Quinnipiac has too many Democrats! PPP is a Democratic firm! This one oversampled blacks, that one Latinos. And of course, these objections are never merely just stated. They're the rhetorical equivalent of dirty nuclear bombs. Conservatives on Twitter howl derisively at these polls as if their purveyors are offering alchemical cures for venereal disease.

more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/04/michael-tomasky-on-the-coming-post-election-gop-freak-out.html