Don’t you just want to slap the next Republican who offers helpful advice to the Democratic Party?

Here is a party that lost the popular vote in the last three presidential elections, failing to crack 41% in the first two and not even managing in 2000 to beat to the widely ridiculed vice president of an impeached horndog. Here is a party that squeals "Mandate!" when it has not quite 53% of the seats in the House of Representatives (recall that the Democrats had three-quarters of all House seats after the 1936 elections and two-thirds after the election of 1976, and even managed to win 58% of all House seats the year Reagan won 49 states). Here is a party whose president was handed the task of dealing with the most hated enemy any American leader has ever faced (bin Laden is surely more hated than Hitler, who had a fair number of U.S. defenders in the runup to World War II), yet this president, with his incoherent foreign policy, has managed to squander the sense of national unity engendered by 9/11 and now struggles to maintain a 60% approval rating. Who the hell are these people to tell us what we’re doing wrong?

David Brooks put his arm around the Democrats' shoulder in last Sunday’s New York Times; this week it was Tucker Carlson’s turn. Some of Carlson’s advice is obvious, and repeats what many liberals have said: The Democratic Party could use a massive infrastructure of think tanks with bottomless bank accounts, funded by stinking-rich ideologues, just like the GOP. Some of what he writes is self-contradictory: First he criticizes the Democrats for having too wonky a focus -- he says that "the entire Democratic strategy" in 2002 "seemed to consist of criticizing Bush’s economic policy by insulting Harvey Pitt" -- then he urges Dems to bestir the electorate with a clarion call for -- folks with weak hearts should pop a beta blocker now -- more money for port security! Can’t you just feel the excitement? Gosh, where is Norman Rockwell when you need a painting?

Carlson suggests that Republicans came to dominate American politics because they had a sense of humor and Democrats didn’t. This is a crock. Yes, Reagan was a happy warrior, but in the early 1980s, when conservatives took over the joint, who else among the dominant figures of the right had a light touch? George Will? Allan (Closing of the American Mind) Bloom? Sure, years later Rush Limbaugh and P. J. O’Rourke and The American Spectator used (contemptuous) humor to score right-wing points, but O’Rourke’s books no longer sell, the Spectator has been reduced to a shell-of-its-former-self Web site, and the few laughs to be had on the right come from Rush and Ann Coulter telling stale Ted Kennedy jokes.

According to Carlson, the Democrats lost their 1960s brio and "became the that’s-not-funny-young-man party." Well, perhaps. But recently, it was Bill O’Reilly who wagged a nannyish finger and got rapper Ludacris canned as a Pepsi spokesman. It’s Andrew Sullivan who patrols the world of political commentary like a high school hall monitor, prissily handing out "Sontag award nominations" like so many detention slips. And, of course, it was the Bush White House that pressured ABC to kick Bill Maher off the air -- the GOP is literally "the that’s-not-funny-young-man party" in Maher’s case. (Not a lot of laughs in the White House, by the way, particularly in its upper echelons. Bush is testy and snappish, Cheney is incurably dyspeptic, Rumsfeld is withering in his condescension -- they’re like a three-judge panel from Salem 1620.)

Reading the GOP’s smug advice columns, I’m reminded of something I saw Eddie Murphy do in a comedy club in his Saturday Night Live days. It was audition night at the club, and Murphy, who was in the audience, prevailed upon the MC to let him go on stage and test some material. The audience, having watched a succession of lousy wannabes, went crazy for Murphy. But Murphy wasn’t satisfied. When a hapless auditioner followed him and stumbled nervously through his routine, Murphy heckled the auditioner from the audience, then returned to the stage and humiliatingly lectured the poor guy on his delivery. Murphy then left the stage and let the guy continue -- but when he stumbled again, Murphy went back up and humiliated him even more.

This was around the time when Murphy was telling interviewers he wanted to be "the Beatles of comedy."

In other words, this was before Bowfinger, I Spy, and The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

Sooner or later, the fate of the arrogant GOP is going to look a lot like Eddie Murphy’s career.