ROMNEYWORLD WAS THE NEW GREEN ZONE

Look, it's fine to think you're right. What's not fine is thinking that you can't possibly be wrong because the people who'd have to be right if you're wrong are people for whom you have contempt. It's not fine to continue to have 100% certainty that you're right when evidence mounts that you're wrong, evidence you dismiss precisely because you don't trust any source that questions what you're doing, until your definition of a truth-teller is anyone who tells you what you want to hear.

That was the problem of the Bush administration in Iraq as everything fell apart. That was the problem of Romneyworld in this election:

Politico:

Multiple Romney sources buzzed about one number in particular: 15 percent. According to exit polls, that's the share of African-Americans who voted in Ohio this year. In 2008, the black percentage of the electorate was 11 percent. In Virginia and Florida, exit polls showed the same share of African-Americans turned out as four years ago, something that GOP turnout models did not anticipate.

"We didn't think they'd turn out more of their base vote than they did in 2008, but they smoked us," said one Romney operative. "It's unbelievable that that they turned out more from the African-American community than in 2008. Somehow they got 'em to vote."

New York Times:

The power of [the Obama turnout] operation stunned Mr. Romney's aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla. "It's one thing to say you are going to do it; it’s another thing to actually get out there and do it," said Brian Jones, a senior adviser.

Dick Morris, explaining a belief that was shared by the entire cockeyed-optimist pro-Romney pundit class:

The key reason for my bum prediction is that I mistakenly believed that the 2008 surge in black, Latino, and young voter turnout would recede in 2012 to "normal" levels. Didn't happen. These high levels of minority and young voter participation are here to stay. And, with them, a permanent reshaping of our nation’s politics....

I derided the media polls for their assumption of what did, in fact happen: That blacks, Latinos, and young people would show up in the same numbers as they had in 2008. I was wrong. They did.

These people knew the Obama campaign was good. Did they make no allowances for the very real possibility that the Obamaites were really, really good? They knew the polls were against them in the swing states. Did they not even admit that it was possible the polls, in the aggregate, were correct? They knew the country's demographic changes weren't temporary, for crissake. Were they really thinking more or less what Jon Stewart said (in a Dick Morris voice) last night?

"I thought the minorities who voted in 2008 would have disappeared by now. I thought maybe they would return to their home planets, or reach their expiration date, dissolved into whatever minorities are made of, or something. But it turns out they still exist in human form."

As in Iraq under Bush, the enemy was non-white -- so of course it would be silly to think they could do serious harm to obviously superior white Republican patriots. And as in the case of Iraq, the people in the political world who expressed doubts about the Republicans' strategy were dirty liberals and the hated MSM; no amount of evidence they might amass could possibly mean anything, right?

Romney HQ (and the Fox News building) were the Green Zone of this decade.