SEVERAL of my colleagues have written characteristicallyincisivepieces about what lessons the Republicans should take from losing an eminently winnable election. Over at the Corner, Michael Walsh and Mark Krikorian recommend a few lessons of their own. For Mr Walsh, the number one lesson learned from Tuesday's defeat is that "the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos." That's number one! "Republicans should immediately begin constructing their own media operation," he writes, as if no such enterprises exist. The best-rated cable-news channel is Fox! Five of the top ten radio programmes (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Neal Boortz) are conservative! Messrs Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity et al have spent the last four years telling their listeners that Mr Obama is an incompetent Kenyan-Marxist-Muslim-Commie-Socialist doomed to defeat. Such sentiments soothe their listeners and are good for ratings, but the parts about incompetence and imminent defeat turned out to be false. The problem is not that conservatives lack media outlets; the problem comes when they fail to venture outside of them. Mr Walsh also advises Republicans to "lay off the social issues", which is probably a good idea.

As for Mr Krikorian, he pours water on the suggestion offered by many that Republicans ought to moderate their stance on immigration as a matter of some urgency. His reasoning is this: a more moderate stance on immigration will attract fewer Hispanic voters than it will lose white voters (thank goodness someone on the right is finally working on the most pressing question of the day: how can Republicans attract more white voters). Hispanics, you see, "are poorer than average, pay less in taxes, use more in government services, benefit from affirmative action and are less likely to have health insurance—so the Democrats' message of big government and racial quotas is going to resonate with them, as it always has." He goes on to assure readers that some of his best friends are Hispanic. Joke! Joke! He does, however, offer a little head pat to Hispanics: "a quarter to a third of them," he writes, "especially those who are more assimilated, better educated and middle-class are open to Republican arguments."

Where to begin. How about this: of cardinal importance to attracting a greater share of an increasingly multicultural populace's vote lies not in any single shift in policy, but in not talking like Mark Krikorian. Or like his colleague, John O'Sullivan, who writes that "immigration, by increasing diversity, slowly frays the social fabric", a statement of stunning vacuity but decided nastiness. Or like Andrew McCarthy, who in a truly unhinged column compares "Hispanic activists" to Islamists in that both "are the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty." On the subject of immigration Mr Obama was profoundly vulnerable: he has no legislative victories to his credit, and he has deported more undocumented immigrants than any president in history. But he is not vulnerable to a party that endorses, or even fails to repudiate, legislation that shreds the fourth amendment and requires police to check brown people's papers, that proposes self-deportation (in practice: making life as intolerable as possible for undocumented immigrants so they just go home) as its chosen immigration policy and that generally seems to think of them as people to be either chased out or, at best, ruefully and marginally tolerated. ("One-quarter of you people seem OK; the rest of you are lazy affirmative-action moochers" does not an election win.) To put it more simply: laying policy aside, a party that equates, as Mr McCarthy seems to, appealing to Hispanic voters with losing your core identity is not yet in a position to appeal to Hispanic voters. And a party that believes diversity results in social decay does not have much chance with a diverse electorate.