Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: I promise not to gloat... much edition

Frank Bruni delivers the uplifting, heartwarming tale of how Karl Rove sucks.

On election night 2012, when he was brought low by Mitt Romney's defeat and the party's miserable showing in Senate races, he went into denial. It was something to see, something that really will endure, that half-hour or so on Fox News, when he insisted on an alternate reality to the one described by NBC and CBS and even his own Fox colleagues, who were calling the election, correctly, for President Obama. Rove would have none of it, and no wonder. It didn't just contradict the statements he'd been making for months as a gabby media pundit. It undercut the pose he'd been striking for more than a decade as a lofty political prophet.

The difference between Karl Rove and Charles Ponzi? Ponzi didn't have a camera focused on him when the scheme fell apart.

The New York Times provides a nice dose of rubbing salt for those wounded by Uncle Karl.

The millionaires and billionaires who gave nearly $500 million to independent groups in the race to elect Mitt Romney and other Republicans not only bet on the wrong party, they bet on the wrong tactic. They believed that an endless drumbeat of television advertisements would be enough to drive voters away from President
It did not work. ...

There is something supremely cynical about the notion among Republican conservatives that they could use their ability to make unlimited contributions to 'super PACs' and shadowy social-welfare groups to buy an election. It views voters as a flock of sheep, easily hypnotized by misleading ads, willing to believe whatever wealthy industrialists tell them about taxes, jobs and health care.

Ross Douthat tries to find his way back to reality...

The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. It just failed to unseat a president presiding over one of the longest stretches of mass unemployment since the Great Depression. In a year when the Senate map offered them numerous opportunities, the Republicans managed to lose two seats instead.

A little shaky on the mount...

No doubt a more moderate tone on immigration would help Republicans. But the idea of amnesty as a Latino-winning electoral silver bullet is a fantasy.

True enough...

What the party really needs, much more than a better identity-politics pitch, is an economic message that would appeal across demographic lines ' reaching both downscale white voters turned off by Romney's Bain Capital background and upwardly mobile Latino voters who don't relate to the current G.O.P. fixation on upper-bracket tax cuts.

Wait, I think I know where you can find a message just like that. It's called the Democratic Party.

Maureen Dowd declares Romney president. Sort of.

It makes sense that Mitt Romney and his advisers are still gobsmacked by the fact that they're not commandeering the West Wing.

Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.

Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.

...

In its delusional death spiral, the white male patriarchy was so hard core, so redolent of country clubs and Cadillacs, it made little effort not to alienate women. The election had the largest gender gap in the history of the Gallup poll, with Obama winning the vote of single women by 36 percentage points.

As W.'s former aide Karen Hughes put it in Politico on Friday, 'If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.'

Can I just say how nice it is when Dowd actually writes an article rather than putting out a rambling bit of snarky soap opera?

Craig Shirley admits that things didn't go that well for the GOP.

True, the election outcome was a rejection of Mitt Romney, but it was also a rejection of a political party that for many has become incoherent at best and contradictory at worst. Doubts plague the GOP. It is no exaggeration to call them 'severe.' ...

What is left of the national party is a smoking hole in the ground with millions, possibly billions, of dollars wasted and establishmentarians lashing out against the very conservatives who helped build the party. Because Romney never understood conservatism, he could never explain to swing voters how a limited-government philosophy could make the country more secure and their lives better.

Want to see how divided the GOP really is right now, read this article back to back with Douthat's and see how different they are in their diagnosis and recommended treatment. If that's not enough, half the Washington Post Opinion page consists of disagreeing self-diagnoses.

Dana Millbank leads the GOP through the five stages of political grief.

Kathleen Parker let's us in on the wisdom she gained months ago but hasn't shared till now.

If nothing else, one had to look only at the two political conventions. One was colorful, vibrant, excited and happy. The other was pale, moribund, staid and restrained. If the latter sounds like something in the final stages of life, you're not far off.

Brent Rose has the inside scoop on the most popular picture on the Internet.