[Uncle Chip]

"We're so far gone. We're over the cliff," the Texas Republican told Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop" program.

Yep with so much at stake in the election, your Libertarians who threw their votes away on boneheads giving the Democrats the Presidency and the Senate are over the cliff.

[Wallace T.]

The numbers don't support the libertarian vote throwing the election to Obama. Nationwide, Obama won by 2.6 million votes. The Libertarian Presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, won 1.2 million votes. In all but one of the swing states, Obama's victory margin exceeded the combined third party vote. The exception is Florida, but the third party count included the Green Party Presidential candidate, Jill Stein, whose voters would have either sat out the election or reluctantly voted for Obama.

It is possible some libertarian minded people did not vote, but voter turnout for both Obama and Romney were down from the 2008 numbers.

Additionally, conservative sour grapes toward libertarians or the Christian right will not encourage members of either camp to reconcile with mainstream conservatism. Ron Paul is naive regarding foreign policy and has associated with conspiracists in his career and the more religiously oriented statements of Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, and the GOP senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana alienated large numbers of voters, especially women. The age of Reagan may be over, but his Eleventh Commandment needs to be resurrected. The carrot works better than the stick.