We conservatives need to get our heads right about the mid-terms or liberals will end up guzzling patriot tears and their gloating will be flat-out intolerable. We’re not doomed in 2018 – I mean, it’s not like tax reform or pulling out of the Paris Climate Scam, which have already killed millions of people, including me and you. But, if we fail to get on course for victory then we’re going to see Nancy Pelosi and the Gropeocrats back in charge and trying to make America into California.

Trust me. You do not want to live in the United States of California.

So, the first step toward victory is some real talk about us normals – you know, conservatives who are more concerned with our country than with muttering about principles and trying to sell cruise cabins. We need to talk about how we’ve screwed up and how we need to change what we’re doing wrong. We got lazy after we vanquished Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and installed what has turned out to be the most conservative president since St. Ronald. We had the House, and we had the Senate, so we relaxed. Sure, we’ve gotten some great things done, but every step has been a battle thanks to the enraged Dems, their lying media pals, and that cheesy bunch of Never Trump weasels who are motivated by rage at how we dissed them and their Conservative, Inc., cronies. The enemy is creating a sense of permanent chaos, and they intend to present themselves as a return to normality. “Vote for us liberals and everything goes back to normal,” they’ll lie. They’ll actually amp up the insanity with impeachment shenanigans and obstruction, and they’ll probably bumble their way into provoking a short and hilarious civil war.

We have to stop them, but stopping them starts with us fixing what we’re doing wrong. We can only change ourselves, so we need to do that.

Yeah, I know the Democrats are awful – don’t you read my sensational columns and follow my outstanding Twitter feed? But we’re not talking about them now.

Yeah, I know the liberal media is composed of lying creeps who to serve as Chuck Schumer’s steno pool when they aren’t awkwardly harassing the interns since they aren’t capable of winning themselves women like real men. But we’re not talking about them now.

Yeah, I know the Trumpaphobic True Conservatives™ are desperately trying to regain their power and prestige after we rejected them along with the rest of the Jeb!-loving Establishment Fredocons who never managed to conserve anything except the cash they raked in falsely promising to fight fight fight. But we’re not talking about them now.

We’re talking about us now. Let’s talk about what we did wrong. Let’s talk about what we need to change, because if we don’t change The Swamp is going to swamp us. Our opponents are motivated. They are organizing. They are targeting the weakest Republicans, and in Virginia and Alabama they snatched seats we should have kept or taken.

In Virginia, we had a huge, bloody primary fight that left the winner weak going into the general. Ed Gillespie is an Establishment meat puppet, but he would have been okay, and “okay” is better than any commie Dem. We need to pick our fights. Here’s a news flash – the most conservative candidate won’t win every time. We need to figure out who is the most conservative candidate who can win, and back him/her – that’s the old Buckley rule. The purge of the squishes must come later. We need raw numbers, and if that means accepting the occasional Susan Collins, fine. She’s the closest thing to a win in Maine, so accept that and move on.

In Virginia, the Democrats nearly took the legislature by identifying vulnerable seats, sneaking in with money, tech, and logistics, and pushing turn-out of motivated pinkos. They caught us napping. That’s their plan in 2018 too – but now we know the score. We need to identify our vulnerabilities and start building our defenses – and we can also to identify their vulnerabilities so we can snatch some Democrat seats in Trump country. That means we need to give money and time and not do the grumbly “I’ve got the madz and the sadz at how the GOP isn’t perfectly conservative so I’m staying home, darn it, and ensuring the Democrats win” thing.

We’ll never get 100% of what we want. Ever. Deal with it. So, John McCain torpedoed the Obamacare repeal? I guess the rational response is to let the libs run rampant, right? Sheesh. Stop being a pouty teen, man up, and get back in the fight.

I get mad too. I’m furious with the Elderly Mutant Establishment Turtle. But I’m an adult, not a child, and sometimes I have to delay my unholy vengeance. We worry too much about purging our ranks and not enough about making sure we still have ranks to purge. Oh, the accounting shall come – we will have our revenge. But today we need to keep control of Capitol Hill so Donald Trump can keep packing the courts, gutting the bureaucracy, and winning the war against jihadi dirtbags.

We can wait to get even.

Exhibit A is Roy Moore. Face it – we screwed that up bad. He was a terrible candidate, and terrible candidates lose.

Let’s concede he was treated unfairly by the lying media. Gloria Allred and her scuzzy minions lied about him. Team McConnell spent a ton of much-needed money trying to force a GOPe stooge down Alabamians’ throats so The Tortoise wouldn’t have to deal with the uppity Mo Brooks. Maybe there was some voter fraud. All that’s irrelevant.

Roy Moore was a terrible candidate from the beginning, and when it became clear he was wounded we should have rebuffed his selfish determination to stay in the race. I don’t care if he was innocent. That’s not the point. I don’t care about Roy Moore – he, like every politician, is expendable. He should have dropped out right away because he became a liability. When he wouldn’t, we had to support him or write off a winnable seat, wasting money and credibility because Humility Boy decided Jesus was on his side (Narrator: But Jesus was not on his side).

We owed Roy Moore nothing – he owed us loyalty, which he failed to show when he refused to drop out and make way for an undamaged candidate. His determination to make this race about “clearing his name” cost us a Senate seat. If he wanted to clear his name, there were courtrooms for that. Instead, we got stuck with a guy we knew was a doofus even before he admitted he was a skeevy doofus.

Weird candidates lose. The claims of illegality against him are shaky, but based on his own admissions, the best case was this guy scammed on high school girls in his thirties. Okay, legal or not, that’s going to turn people off. And it did –Republican turn out tanked because when your argument is, “Well, my creeping on teens was technically legal,” you’re going to lose votes.

Oh, and it’s not just that he was a Class A Strange-o. Let’s not forget his awful campaign. While the Democrats were crunching numbers and working the data, Roy was disappearing for days at a time and then riding to the polls on Sassy the Wonder Horse. Perhaps more GOP voters would have turned out for someone who neither checked out the local cheerleader action nor shopped at Elmer Gantry’s Big Warehouse of Redneck Stereotypes.

Yeah, Moore was still better than that baby-killing advocate Doug Jones, but Luther Strange would have won. Mo Brooks would have won. Sassy the Wonder Horse would have won. Moore lost. We need to stop nominating losers.

We have a lot of Senate races coming up. I like some of the more conservative folks – Dr. Kelli Ward in Arizona, Austin Petersen in Missouri. But here’s the thing – if they, fairly or not, allow themselves to be marginalized such as they are less likely win the general than their GOP primary opponents, I’ll toss them over. Nothing personal, just business. It’s their job to win, and we don’t owe any politicians loyalty to back them if they can’t complete that basic task. This is a performance-based endeavor and even though we like them, if they aren’t the ones most likely to win then they need to go. This is about winning. Period.

The lessons are clear. We need to understand that our enemy is serious, motivated and intent on finding and exploiting the weaknesses in our candidates. We need to be ruthless in deciding who is most likely to win, even if it means backing someone who is 80% with us instead of 90%. It means being coldly rational instead of over-heatedly emotional.

We need to win the midterms next year. We need to get our heads right to do it. Yeah, our enemies are horrible and politics is unfair. Boo hoo. We can’t change that. The only thing we can change is ourselves, and we need to or we’ll get crushed.