‘The Limited Politicos Show’ is a weekly political podcast hosted by Clint Betts. Clint has been widely praised as having the intellect of a George Will or Paul Krugman; the humor of a Jon Stewart or Bill Maher; and the body of a Sarah Palin or Barbara Boxer.

If you like your politics like Clint likes his women—a little overbearing, extremely manipulative, yet still not quite ready to settle down—this is the political podcast for you.

Listen to the most recent episode and subscribe to ‘The Limited Politicos Show’ on iTunes by clicking here.

It’s important to note Huntsman didn’t call on the federal government to enact new laws, or ask Congress to amend the United States Constitution in any way. What he wrote was “conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry.”

Over on the LDS Church-owned website KSL.com, Huntsman is being ridiculed for not being a “true conservative.”

Setting aside the fact most of the KSL commenters calling Huntsman a “liberal” or a “left-wing lunatic” struggle mightily with basic grammar; anyone who argues Huntsman is a “radical leftist” based on his decision to promote states rights when it comes to gay marriage is making a false accusation.

What is conservative about asking the federal government to amend the Constitution to limit marriage in this country to unions of just one man and one woman?

Why do “true conservatives” believe the federal government should play any role at all in marriage?

Why do “true conservatives” care if gay people want to get married?

A “true conservative” should want to limit any intrusion by the federal government into our personal lives.

If “true conservatives” don’t trust the federal government to regulate commerce, control spending, or uphold basic rights like those granted in the Second Amendment, why do “true conservatives” trust the federal government to be fair arbiters when it comes to marriage?

True Conservative

Shouldn’t marriage be soley between the two parties making the commitment to each other and their God? How come “true conservatives” want to bring the federal government into the equation?

Why do “true conservatives” believe our bedrooms and whom we choose to love need to be regulated? Shouldn’t “true conservatives” be against more regulation by the federal government?

Don’t pretend to be worried every church in the United States will be forced to conduct same-sex marriages if we allow gay people access to the same basic human rights everyone else in this country is currently afforded. THAT. WILL. NEVER. HAPPEN. If a religious institution wants to remain intolerant, thanks to the First Amendment, they’ll be able to continue practicing intolerance.

Most “true conservatives” want the media and the rest of this country to stop talking about marriage equality and start focusing on more important issues. On this point, we all agree. Let’s stop talking about marriage equality and come to terms with the fact that we live in the year 2013 where discrimination and intolerance should have no place in our society.

If “true conservatives” want everyone to stop talking about gay marriage, they should stop opposing it, so we can move on to the 21st century.

Gay marriage will happen. The only thing up for debate now is how “true conservatives” will be remembered in 50 years.

The truth is history will likely remember those who currently label themselves “true conservatives” as ignorant bigots. Their place in history will not be unlike those who opposed desegregation during the Civil Rights Movement.

The truth is, when it comes to same-sex marriage, Jon Huntsman is a true conservative.

All Americans should be treated equally by the law, whether they marry in a church, another religious institution, or a town hall. This does not mean that any religious group would be forced by the state to recognize relationships that run counter to their conscience. Civil equality is compatible with, and indeed promotes, freedom of conscience.

Marriage is not an issue that people rationalize through the abstract lens of the law; rather it is something understood emotionally through one’s own experience with family, neighbors, and friends. The party of Lincoln should stand with our best tradition of equality and support full civil marriage for all Americans.

This is both the right thing to do and will better allow us to confront the real choice our country is facing: a choice between the Founders’ vision of a limited government that empowers free markets, with a level playing field giving opportunity to all, and a world of crony capitalism and rent-seeking by the most powerful economic interests.

— Jon Huntsman Jr.

Rubin was up to her old tricks again yesterday in her column on Hillary Clinton’s testimony before Congress on Benghazi. I’ve decided to copy the entire piece and add my annotations in bold because just writing about the sentences Rubin puked onto the Internet doesn’t do this shitty columnist or her shitty column justice.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate testimony on Benghazi, Libya, certainly was interesting … before it became jaw dropping. [A strong opening sentence, until you realize Rubin has no jaw---not to mention a backbone or integrity.] Clinton claimed never to have seen the talking points or to picking U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to go on the Sunday talk shows, seemingly throwing the one-time Clinton administration aide under the bus. [This is what shitty columnists do: they try to claim someone did something they didn't do by writing bullshit like "seemingly throwing the one-time Clinton administration aide under the bus." The truth is Clinton adamantly defended Rice throughout her testimony, most notably here.] Clinton later threw a crumb, saying she did not know of any evidence that contradicted it. (But wait. Clinton said she knew it was terrorism.) [But wait. Video or no video, everyone knew what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. I really don't understand the GOP's obsession with Rice and the initial intelligence reports that blamed the attack on a video. Has Rubin EVER mentioned how wrong the intelligence was leading up to the Iraq War during the Bush Administration? 4 Americans died in the Benghazi attack; more than 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq War.] Sen Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) showed some moxie in grilling Clinton on the lack of awareness of the growing al-Qaeda threat. [Meh.]

And then Clinton blurted out a showstopper:

It doesn’t matter if the administration lied? Umm. Ooops. ["Umm. Ooops." Rubin is always so goddamn profound. Another example of how to spot a really shitty columnist: they take shit out of context in order to push a narrative only they believe to be true. Clinton didn't say, "What difference does it make if the administration lied?" Only Rubin, who lives in a fantasyland where polls are skewed and Mitt Romney is the second coming of Jesus Christ, believes Clinton said it doesn't matter if the administration lied during her exchange with rookie Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).] That will make the anti-Hillary ads if she runs in 2016. The New Media and conservative Republicans pounced. [Rubin believed this whole Benghazi thing would ensure a Romney presidency. If it didn't hurt Obama, how in the hell is it going to hurt Clinton four years from now? Oh, and who is she referring to when she says "The New Media"?]

But more important has been Clinton’s acknowledgement as to how dangerous and widespread al-Qaeda is in Northern Africa. This is directly contrary to the Obama-Hagel meme that we have decimated al-Qaeda and really don’t need that big military any more. Clinton in essence just told the president his idea that we have “peace in our time” is crazy talk. [Girl, STOP.]

Perhaps Clinton should be brought in as a witness in the Chuck Hagel secretary of defense hearings. By the Republicans. [Dear God. Who reads this shit? Why does Rubin work for a respectable institution like The Washington Post? Where am I? What day is it? The polls are skewed! THE. POLLS. ARE. SKEWED.]

UPDATE (11:50 a.m.): There was also this eye-popping moment in which Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) showed why he is so formidable. [Rand Paul will never, EVER be president, so it's unclear what she means by "formidable." I wrote about the Paul-Clinton exchange yesterday. You can find it here.]

And with that, he did great damage to the myth of Clinton’s competence. [Jennifer Fucking Rubin, everybody! Here's what Dana Milbank, Rubin's colleague, had to say about the Paul-Clinton exchange: "Only gadfly Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) still had the stomach to fight with Clinton. 'Had I been president at the time and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi . . . I would have relieved you of your post,' he charged.

Rubin's response: "The New Media is going to pounce all over your ass, Milbank. The polls are skewed!"]

What’s great about Paul’s blatant political posturing is his assertion that he would have appointed Clinton to be his Secretary of State in the first place—if only he were president right now instead of Barack Obama. We all know Paul gets his rocks off to thoughts of him in the Oval Office with someone like John Bolton serving as his Secretary of State. He’s not fooling anybody.

What’s even better is Paul’s admission that even in his fantasies—when he is President of the United States and Ted Nugent is his Treasury Secretary—he is unable to prevent the Sept. 11 attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi from happening.

The irony of this debacle is if Obama weren’t president right now, there is absolutely no chance Rand Paul would be calling The White House home. The Marine Band would be playing “Hail to the Chief” every time President Hillary Clinton walked into a room.

To top his embarrassing performance off, Paul called the Benghazi attack “the worst tragedy since 9/11.” Only a person who spends an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about a scenario wherein he gets to fire Hillary Clinton would make such a moronic statement. Paul must have been too busy highlighting his pocket copy of the Constitution during the recent, far more tragic and far less predictable, events in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado. Paul also overlooked the more than 4,000 Americans who have died since the beginning of the Iraq War—a war based on the same kind of faulty intelligence Paul now decries.

If I were a voter in the great state of Kentucky, I would relieve him of his post.

The Wall Street Journal seems to think President Obama’s re-election means the Bush tax cuts should be extended for those making $250,000 or more annually. Of course the exact opposite is true. During the campaign, Mr. Obama didn’t run on many specifics or lay out much of a vision for a second term. The one thing he did run on, however, is increasing taxes on wealthy Americans. In nearly every campaign speech he gave throughout the election cycle, Mr. Obama argued the wealthy should be asked to pay a little more in taxes in order to help bring down the deficit. Yet The Wall Street Journal wants you to think Mr. Obama doesn’t have a mandate when it comes to this issue.

Let’s take a look at their argument:

We took it as a hopeful sign at first that Mr. Obama didn’t mention “tax rates.” That could leave some room to compromise with House Speaker John Boehner, who said this week he’ll consider more tax revenue without raising tax rates. But later on Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the President will veto any bill that includes an extension of the current tax rates for those earning more than $250,000.

Mr. Obama also demanded that House Republicans immediately pass a Senate bill extending current tax rates for lower incomes but not for everyone else, including the millions of small businesses that pay taxes at the individual rates. He added: “And I just want to point out this was a central question during the election. It was debated over and over again. And on Tuesday night, we found out that the majority of Americans agree with my approach.”

Well, that’s not as clear as he claims. One exit poll question on Tuesday asked “Should taxes be raised to help cut the budget deficit?” The answer was no by nearly 2 to 1. A second question asked if tax rates should “increase for all” (13%); “increase only on income over $250,000″ (47%); or “not increase for anyone” (35%). Three quarters of the latter 35% voted for Mitt Romney, which means they are represented more or less by Mr. Boehner, whose House majority also won re-election. On taxes as with so much else, the country is still divided.

The fact is most polls show Americans support raising taxes on the rich by a two-to-one margin. The country really isn’t divided at all when it comes to this particular topic. I realize before the election conservatives dismissed polls by calling them skewed in favor of Democrats, but Tuesday proved math is still math, 2 + 2 still equals 4, and conservative pundits were living in an parallel universe when it came to polls. A recent Gallup poll found 62% of Americans believe the rich pay too little in taxes. Mr. Obama is, without question, on the right side of this issue politically.

The right question is whether Mr. Obama is on the right side of this issue economically. On the economic value of raising taxes on the rich, The Wall Street Journal makes a valid argument:

Congress’s Joint Tax Committee estimates that raising taxes on income over $250,000 ($200,000 if you’re single) will raise $823 billion over 10 years on a static revenue basis. That includes all revenue from increases in marginal income tax rates, capital gains, dividends, reinstating the phaseouts of deductions for the wealthy and also treating dividends as ordinary income.

That’s only $82 billion a year in extra revenue when the federal deficit in fiscal 2012 was $1.1 trillion. So even if Mr. Obama gets his way, his tax increase would only cut the deficit by about 7.5%. And that assumes the tax increase would have no impact on economic growth. If growth slows below its already paltry pace, tax revenue would rise by less than expected despite the higher rates.

While The Wall Street Journal is absolutely correct, I don’t remember them complaining when Mitt Romney claimed he could reduce the deficit by cutting federal assistance to PBS, NPR and Planned Parenthood. Cutting those programs would do absolutely nothing to reduce the deficit.

Every reasonable person understands raising taxes on the wealthy really doesn’t do much in terms of bringing down the deficit. If this is all Mr. Obama proposes to House Republicans, we’re all fucked. I have a feeling this will end up being just a small piece of a much broader plan.

Like The Wall Street Journal, I believe raising taxes on anyone during an economic downturn is a bad idea. Yet I also understand elections have consequences. To argue Mr. Obama doesn’t have a mandate on the tax issue is misleading. Conservatives need to stop living in Fantasyland. We don’t live in a world where the polls are skewed and elections only matter if Republicans win. Obama won. Romney lost. The sooner the right faces this reality, the better. With every passing day, the Republican Party is looking more and more like a middle-aged man who still wears his high school state championship ring—still living in the past.

Worthwhile Observations is a daily segment wherein I, Huck Thompson, scour the internet to bring you what I believe to be the most worthwhile stories, opinions, tweets, and whatever else I find of merit and worthy of discussion. Hopefully you think this is a worthwhile endeavor. If not, you can always go back to watching cat videos on YouTube.

It takes a lot of balls to criticize Mitt Romney’s campaign when the day before the election you were predicting he would win in a landslide; when the day before the election you were hailing him as the next Ronald Reagan; when the day before the election you were touting those running his campaign as geniuses, who were about to shock the political world. It takes a lot of balls…unless your name is Jennifer Rubin. Taking back everything you just said after you’ve been definitively proven wrong is just an average Wednesday for Rubin.

If you’re a serious, intelligent conservative, you will unfollow Rubin on twitter and never, EVER read another word she writes for Right Turn.

From Friedersdorf’s piece in The Atlantic:

“There are two starkly different views of the race. President Obama’s team takes refuge in public state polling and declares it can pull out a close electoral vote win. Mitt Romney’s team looks at voter intensity, early voting and Romney’s lead among independents and concludes he will win,” Rubin wrote at the beginning of a November 1 item. She proceeded to run through all evidence that favored the “Romney view,” said nothing about evidence for the “Obama view,” and concluded, “there is considerable evidence from both polling of and actual early voting that the political landscape portrayed in a number of state polls showing an Obama lead in swing states doesn’t exist. If that improvement in early voting holds up, Democrats should wonder if those state polls in which they have been investing so much hope are even in the 2012 election ballpark.” In fact, there was little reason to wonder if they were in the ballpark.

The same day, writing about Iowa, a state that Obama won 52 to 46.5, Rubin literally copied and pasted a Romney campaign memo with a series of explanations for why they were winning the state. “Perhaps Democrats have other figures, and Election Day turnout is still a question mark,” she says, “but these data make for a compelling case.” The supposedly compelling case included the argument that “the Obama campaign is panicking, and you can see it in the way they are turning out their most reliable, most likely voters long before Election Day. They are using their highest propensity voters to pad their absentee and early vote numbers.” It’s a neat trick. If Democratic turnout is low during early voting, Rubin cites it as evidence that Republicans are going to win the state, polls be damned, whereas when Democratic early voting turnout is high, it’s evidence that they are panicking and are going to lose the election.

Journalists striving to inform don’t employ this sort of double-standard.

On October 31, Rubin wrote, “The media has focused, not surprisingly, on the traditional bellwether state of Ohio. Republicans insist it is a dead heat and that GOP enthusiasm will be the difference on Election Day. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe there are other states that are easier ‘gets’ than Ohio and would in combination yield as many or more electoral votes. With the boost from the Des Moines Register, Republicans feel they are close to bagging Iowa. (Rep. Paul Ryan will be there later in the week.) They are likewise extremely bullish on Wisconsin. (Romney and Ryan will both be going there this week.) Also in this tier of very gettable states from the Republicans’ perspective is Nevada. Jon Ralston reports that Republicans’ performance in early voting is much stronger than 2008, putting that state in play as well.” As it turns out, Obama won all those other states by a significantly larger margin than he won Ohio.

On October 30, Rubin wrote:

“Four years ago the Republican Party was in danger of losing status as a national party, pundits said. It was too white, too southern and too old. The GOP still has a long way to go with minority voters, but after President’s Obama four years in office the Republican presidential ticket is appealing to women, voters in blue state strongholds and independents. Consider the following states with Obama’s 2008 margin is in parenthesis: Ohio (Obama +4.6), Florida (Obama + 2.8), Pennsylvania (Obama + 10.8), Virginia (Obama 6.3), New Hampshire, Colorado (Obama +9), Wisconsin (Obama 13.9), Iowa (Obama +9.5), Indiana (Obama +1.1), North Carolina (Obama +.3) and Minnesota (Obama +10.3). In the most recent public polling Romney is ahead or within the margin of error in every single one of these.

“Put differently, it is possible Obama loses all of them.”

For heaven’s sake. In the widely mocked Dick Morris prediction, Romney was forecast to win 325 electoral votes. Rubin’s was effectively telling her readers it was possible that Romney would get 341 electoral votes!

On October 29, Rubin slyly spun Hurricane Sandy as well-timed for Romney. “The president and Mitt Romney are both suspending campaigning through Tuesday due to Hurricane Sandy, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t campaign news. To the delight of Romney forces, the map continues to expand, and without the campaign itself spending a dime,” she wrote. “If the candidates really are battling it out for Pennsylvania and Minnesota, Romney’s chances look bright.”

On October 26, she wrote that “Obama is scrambling to try to turn out his base, understanding that amid the insults, sneers and pettiness he lost a great deal of the moderate middle of the electorate, especially women.” Meanwhile, over on the news desk, the Washington Post reported in a Wednesday article, “President Obama is winning women, who comprise 53 percent of the overall electorate, by 10 points. If that margin holds, it will be slightly higher than preelection polling suggested but still less than than the losing margin for John McCain (13 points) and George W. Bush (11 points) among women.”

On October 24, Rubin warned her readers away from polls. “Where does the presidential race stand? You can look at the polls, but that isn’t the best indication of where the race is neck-and-neck or safely in one side’s pocket. A GOP insider from Boston said public polling isn’t as revealing as other factors, including where ads remain on the air,” she wrote. “…The race is still close in many key states, so even a few points shifting in a critical state may make a huge difference. There is no doubt, however, to those close to the race and most familiar with the data used to determine ad buys and travel schedules that they’d rather be in Romney’s position than in Obama’s. Given truth serum, the Obama camp would readily agree with that handicapping.”

Said Rubin on October 22, “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to put all his eggs in the basket labeled ‘Discredit Romney.’ Right now, he’s the one lacking plausibility as a competent presidential contender.” Obama wasn’t just losing, he lacked plausibility as someone who could even contend!

That same day, Rubin provided highly questionable debate analysis: “…should Obama try to play the aggressor in the debate, once again he may come across as testy and only compound his problems with female voters and independents. Given his own incompetence in Libya, he’s now limited in accusing Romney of not being ready for prime time. And given that al-Qaeda is certainly not extinguished, he will have to tone down his chest-thumping over Osama bin Laden’s assassination.”

What actually happened? Obama was at his best when aggressive in debates, he somehow managed to win the Libya exchange, and didn’t have to alter the way he talked about Osama Bin Laden.

The same item had this interview excerpt:

“While the media saw the second debate as an Obama comeback, Gillespie says it actually helped Romney. ‘It added to his momentum.’ Is there any danger of overconfidence? Gillespie shoots back, ‘None.’”

This is the sort of outside analysis Rubin constantly saw fit to put before her readers. She actually has an incredible talent for writing wrongheaded, misleading analysis carefully enough that it’s often either technically attributable to someone other than her or not technically incorrect. She just uncritically passes along the latest talking points of the side that she supports.

I could go on. Rubin insisted that Obama would have a huge problem with the Jewish vote, that hammering on Benghazi could be his undoing. But you get the idea. At every opportunity, Rubin wrote favorably about Romney and his campaign. And she didn’t just get things wrong, sometimes absurdly, she always got them wrong in a way that redounded to Team Romney’s benefit. If her goal was striving to inform her right-leaning audience with the truth, she was an abject failure.

Is there any other goal that wouldn’t be discrediting?

As I noted, I’d have hesitated, before now, to go on record speculating that her coverage was disingenuous, rather than attributable to the partisan zeal that has gripped plenty of basically honest pundits. But I nearly spit out my effete acai berry smoothie when I read her campaign post-mortem:

“Until October it was the Perils of Pauline campaign. It moved in fits and starts on foreign policy. The message was rarely consistent from day to day. Gobs of ads were aired to no apparent effect. The convention speech was a huge missed opportunity. Romney made a lunge now and then in the direction of immigration reform and an alternative health-care plan without giving those topics the attention they deserved. The communications team was the worst of any presidential campaign I have ever seen — slow and plodding, never able to capitalize on openings. It was hostile, indifferent and unhelpful to media, conservative and mainstream alike.”

That “huge missed opportunity” of a convention speech was covered by Rubin in the Washington Post:

“Mitt Romney accepted the nomination of his party for president with a speech that showed he can rise to an occasion, and let us see a side of him that was compelling and heartbreaking …When Romney arrived, dramatically walking through the hall, it was a reminder how determined some in the party had been not to like him. No more. He didn’t need to toot his own horn. He certainly looked the presidential part. In confident and calm tones, he described the Obama presidency more in sorrow than in anger… He ended to rousing applause.

“The speech was succinct and clear, providing a contrast to the president, about whom Romney said had no real plan to revive the economy. It was a mirror image of the speaker: well organized, sentimental, reasoned and optimistic. The irony is the Mitt Romney we’ve seen on the trail is not complicated or “weird” or lacking warmth or even out of touch. He is, like many men of his generation, somewhat reserved and in a cultural time warp. Tonight, he also showed some mettle and spine… Tonight he took a step in the right direction.”

Now she tells us she thought it sucked at the time?

And that, for all the months she was acting as America’s most reliable Romney sycophant, she actually thought his campaign was bumbling? Media Matters has more in the same vein. How can this be viewed as anything other than a Rush Limbaugh-style “I’m tired of carrying their water” moment? She didn’t say it as brazenly as Limbaugh, but you can’t compare her work during the campaign to her post-mortem without concluding that she deliberately misled her readers.

As my colleague James Fallows has just put it, “I can name you five mainstream columnists whose hearts are obviously with the Democrats, and five who are obviously with the Republicans. But I believe that what they’re writing or saying reflects what they actually think. I don’t know of another staff member of a mainstream news organization who has blithely admitted to telling the public things different from what the journalist actually thought, so as to boost the cause.”

“Is the Post entirely comfortable with this?” he asks.

As do I.

In journalism, it doesn’t get any more basic than write what you earnestly believe to be true, whether you’re on the news desk or the opinion desk — otherwise you owe your readers the disclosure, “Sometimes I’m going to mislead you in the fashion of a propagandist to sway the election.”

At this point, I’m pretty jaded about the willingness of conservative media figures to disrespect the rank-and-file by lying to them, so I recovered quickly from Rubin’s post-mortem. By the time I got to her other post-election item of note, I could only laugh at what Bill Clinton would colloquially call her brass.

Says Rubin:

“…the Politico-ization of the media (superficial, contrived scandals and invented conflicts) has turned the political dialogue into an endless series of gotcha episodes devoid of substance and sterile in its obsession with horse-race politics and tactics. Devoid of substance and indifferent to policy, the coverage becomes nonstop score-keeping. Who wins? Who benefits? The questions “What should we do?” and “What happened?” get lost in the scramble for more clicks, more eyeballs. The horse-race politics and personality-driven journalism that eschew policy issues can’t be eliminated. But we have to go beyond all of it and make decisions.

“That involves meatier discussion by our pols and more serious coverage by the press. I fear we have so dummied down the debate in this country we’re just not up to it.

“I hope I’m wrong.”

Careful with that “we,” Ms. Rubin. Some of us haven’t spent an entire campaign season breathlessly obsessing over every bit of horse race gossip that could be spun into good news for one side! Some of us haven’t just seen much of our output proven wrong by real world events. If you were ordered to cover the campaign as you did, please do explain the arrangement. If you chose it yourself, please own it with a singular pronoun. You’re not the only journalist to have behaved badly during Election 2012, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to lecture those members of the media who have been openly mocking your approach for months.

For the conservative rank-and-file, this should be instructive. If I’d have told them three years ago that during the 2012 election cycle, they could have a staffer at the Washington Post who would invariably write favorably and sympathetically about the Republican nominee, they’d have celebrated. As it turned out, there were some unintended consequences that they suffered — a dearth of fair-minded coverage during the primaries, a nominee marginally more prone to believing his own bullshit every time it was echoed back to him in the Washington Post, a rank-and-file given information so unreliable that they could no longer assess reality… and for what? A perch at a center-left newspaper doesn’t help conservatives persuade anyone of anything if the person holding it is widely perceived as a disingenuous mouthpiece for her favored candidate. What happens is that conservatives themselves are increasingly the only ones who are misled.

“Nate asked us if we wanted to help him with a project,” Luke Gunderson recalled. “When he said he wanted to start a website dedicated to Mitt Romney, Aaron and I looked at each other and said, ‘Sure, but we don’t know anything about building a website.’ We had no idea what we were getting into.”

Mitt Romney Central launched in September 2009, with little fanfare and lackluster traffic.

“Aaron and I used to get excited about having 100 people on the site at one time,” Luke Gunderson said. “We had no clue. We just knew we believed in Mitt Romney and wanted to help him become president.”

The amount of time the Gunderson brothers spent on Mitt Romney Central is incalculable. The amount of effort, perseverance and dedication to achieving their dream of seeing Mitt Romney sworn in as the 45th President of the United States is just as impressive as it is admirable.

On Tuesday night their dream became a nightmare. Barack Obama will serve another term as president. Mitt Romney will make a graceful exit from the political stage.

Was it worth it? Was it worth all of the time and energy spent on a cause now lost forever?

Of course it was worth it. Mitt Romney was worth it. There are times in each of our lives when the journey is going to be greater than the outcome. Now is one of those times.

William Faulkner once wrote, in his great novel The Wild Palms, “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

Pain and sorrow come to us in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.

In the final months of his campaign, Mitt Romney began to use the phrase “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” on the campaign trail. The words come from a great television series, Friday Night Lights.

For those of you who have never watched Friday Night Lights, it is about a high school football team in the great state of Texas. In the pilot episode the team’s star quarterback is paralyzed after throwing an interception and making an awkward tackle to prevent the other team from scoring.

At the end of the game, both teams come together in the middle of the field, take a knee and lock hands. Coach Taylor, the main character and the man who popularized the phrase “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” offers up a prayer.

“Give all of us who gather here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable, and we will all, at some point in our lives…fall. We will all fall.

“We must carry this in our hearts…that what we have is special. That it can be taken from us, and when it is taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls.

“We will now all be tested. It is these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.”

It may take a few days, but after the hurt and anger subsides, the Gunderson brothers will pick themselves up and keep moving. They still believe in America. Mitt Romney may have lost an election, but his cause, his values, and his beliefs persevere.

The next chapter will likely start the way it always does—over sandwiches.

This time, however, the Gunderson brothers will have some company. An army of over 100,000 facebook friends, 38,000 twitter followers, and dedicated contributors who still believe in the cause.

Mitt Romney Central became more than just a website—it became a movement. The journey has only just begun.

Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can’t Lose.