What WILL be learned vs. what SHOULD be learned

If you played a drinking game last evening where the rules dictated you swallow a shot every time a Republican defeated a Democrat, you're probably still asleep. Or maybe even dead. But if not, and even if you went to bed early, you already know that we Democrats were beaten yesterday. Badly. Soundly. Decisively. We lost governorships; we lost House seats; we lost the Senate; we lost our asses. Of course, the silver lining to such a drubbing, if there is one, is that we're now presented, through our bitter, angry, resentful tears of loss and frustration, a chance to learn. But while there are obviously a number of lessons to be had from our multi-pronged defeat, those need to be the right lessons.

As we Democrats--amateur and professional alike--sift through the smoking, fetid, blackened ruins of yesterday's electoral train wreck, we need to take objective inventory of where we are, how we got here, and what we need to do to ensure this sort of highly lopsided blowout never happens again. But knowing both people in general and Democrats in particular as I do, I imagine some (many? most?) of the lessons learned will be, sadly and stupidly, diametrically opposite what they should be.

Please read on too see what I mean...