President Obama really did win

Thank you Rachel Maddow! What follows are entirely her words, from The Rachel Maddow Show, last night (Wednesday, November 7, 2012). It’s worth the few minutes to read (below) or watch the video, whether you are on the left, right, or center of our political spectrum:

“…We now know that President Obama won in pretty much exactly the way the state by state polls said he was going to win. He won with more than 300 electoral votes. It was not magic, it was just math – math that was completely invisible to the political Right.

…When the real math of the real world came barreling out of the dark at them last night, they hid from it, they could not believe it.

Ohio really did go to President Obama last night (Tuesday), and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States – again.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to over-sampled Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math.

And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.

Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats, for very obvious reasons. But it was also possibly a good night for this country as a whole – because, in this country, we have a two party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems, and we debate between those possible solutions, and by the process of debate we pick the best idea.

That competition between good ideas, from both sides, about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff.

And if the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum sealed, door locked, spin cycle, of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate between competing feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night, the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real-time – in real humiliating time – not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside, if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, I’m sure, but it will be good for the whole country – left, right, and center.

You guys, we’re counting you. Wake up. There’s real problems in the world. There are real knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let’s move on from there.

If the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night (Tuesday), we will all be better off as a nation.

And in that spirit; congratulations, everybody.”