As we all know, and as the editors of Politico are going to remind us with nauseating and robotic regularity between now and 2016, the Republicans are out there, diligently rebranding themselves as genuinely concerned for the less fortunate among us, and ever more open to new policies to lift the poors out of poordom, as long as those policies do not in any way involve the government or Jamie Dimon's taxes.

Except, of course, that there are still a couple of dozen metric tons of cruelty, bigotry, intolerance, and nonsense to unload before the ship is ready to sail into the golden beyond.

"They aggressively got out the base of their base, the base of their base that's dependent, to a great extent economically, on government policy and government programs," Sununu said during a forum with two other Republican former governors, Steve Merrill and Craig Benson, at Concord's Grappone Conference Center.

At this gathering of the fossilized, Sununu turned out to represent the sensible center.

"I agree with everything that John said," Merrill said, adding that he believes the 2012 election was about "the cult of the personality" as much as anything else. "Certainly Barack Obama did not get re-elected based on his performance. ... But his personality, particularly in campaign mode, was something that they liked and that they were attracted to, and that helped drive that base," Merrill said.

Also, too:

"For those people that believe that the government can do a better job, here's what they do a better job of: They get people addicted, in some cases, to the fact that maybe they don't need to go out and make their own future. They get people addicted to the idea that maybe they can't do something on their own. And there's no worse fate for anybody in this world than to think that they can't do something magnificent with their life," Benson said. "So what the Democratic Party does is, it takes people's dreams away, period."

Of course, on the upside, young pheeenom Marco Rubio told future campaign biographer Mike Allen that his view of the physical sciences has moved boldly into the late 19th Century, so things couldn't possibly be getting any better.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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