It’s “Merry Xmas, not” for Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and Tea Partiers, etc. Losing the November election was bad enough, but it’s gotten worse since, considerably worse.

The party, and consequentially its ideas, is in freefall.

As of last week, 57 percent approve and 42 percent disapprove of Barack Obama’s performance as president. Pretty soon he’ll be as popular as Roosevelt — or Reagan.

What is the cause of this debacle? Largely this: Republicans, conservatives… the whole list above… do not know how to talk to the broad spectrum of the American people outside their choir.

Republicans are not just bad at public relations. They’re disastrous at it.

With rare exceptions, this goes for the entire panoply of the right – from elected officials to party leaders to pundits and talk show hosts to think tank intellectuals from the most extreme conservatives to the most losey-goosey of so-called RINOs. No difference.

What we have here in the immortal words of Cool Hand Luke’s Strother Martin is a “failure to communicate.”

And this failure has occurred at the very time America has over 8 percent unemployment and is over 16 trillion in debt. Go figure. You would think a party of economic austerity, or even semi-austerity, would be more popular than ever.

Failure to communicate, indeed.

Unfortunately, fixing this public relations deficit is not going to be easy. It’s too entrenched and too long-standing. The Republican brand is tarnished, maybe even hopelessly so, certainly beyond what should be acceptable to anyone.

The kneejerk response of many is to go back to pure conservative principles — a kind of Maoist ideological purge.

If only.

Consider this: the word conservative itself may be a large part of the problem. Few young people want to identify with it, even when the ideas and values inherent in the ideology make perfect sense to them, even when they are already living by those values.

Benghazi is back.

In a way.

The awaited special report by an independent review panel led by retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering and the former Joint Chiefs chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, has been delivered to Congress and offered few revelations, at least according to the Associated Press.

The report appeared to break little new ground about the timeline of the Benghazi attack during which Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens, information specialist Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods — who were contractors working for the CIA — were killed. Stevens’ slaying was the first of a U.S. ambassador since 1988.

But it confirmed that contrary to initial accounts, there was no protest outside the consulate and said responsibility for the incident rested entirely with the terrorists who attacked the mission.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, administration officials linked the attack to the spreading protests over an American-made, anti-Islamic film that had begun in Cairo earlier that day. Those comments came after evidence already pointed to a distinct militant attack. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on numerous TV talk shows the Sunday after the attack and used the administration talking points linking it to the film.

But we knew that, didn’t we?

The report apparently also excoriates State Department branches (the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Bureau of Near East Affairs) for security lapses. Something else we knew — or at least assumed. Security at the Benghazi compound was obviously horrendous. It didn’t take a report — or a rocket scientist — to tell you that.

Further, according to the AP, the report exonerates the military. Quoting verbatim: “There was simply not enough time for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference.”

How that was ascertained is unclear since the same report adds little to what we know of the timeline. But never mind. Perhaps that will be made clear when Pickering and Mullen testify before Congress on Wednesday. Or perhaps not.

The report also makes 29 recommendations for tightening up security in these dangerous foreign venues, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, herself not able to testify because of a concussion, has nonetheless found time to accept. She thanked the review board for their work.

In college I read a novel called The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart inspired by a legend/theory from the Talmud — that there are thirty-six righteous souls (the Lamed Vav) in every generation whose existence justifies “the purpose of mankind” to God. From Wikipedia:

As a mystical concept, the number 36 is even more intriguing. It is said that at all times there are 36 special people in the world, and that were it not for them, all of them, if even one of them was missing, the world would come to an end. The two Hebrew letters for 36 are the lamed, which is 30, and the vav, which is 6. Therefore, these 36 are referred to as the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim. This widely-held belief, this most unusual Jewish concept is based on a Talmudic statement to the effect that in every generation 36 righteous “greet the Shechinah,” the Divine Presence (Tractate Sanhedrin 97b; Tractate Sukkah 45b).

I hadn’t thought of the Lamed Vav or Schwarz-Bart’s book for a while until the other day when my friend Banfsheh Zand, an Iranian activist, sent her email list a YouTube video from Belgium.

A man — seemingly by himself — had stood up at a town hall meeting in that country and denounced the installation of two Islamists who had just won positions in a municipal election. He said their election was illegal because the men were avowed adherents of Shariah law, which is in direct contradiction with Belgian civil law and the European Convention on Human Rights.

The man was right, of course, but no one rose to his defense. When he left, the formal installation of the Islamists was completed as if nothing happened.

Was this lone man one of the Lamed Vav?

If so, I hope his thirty-five compatriots are paying attention. (And that the man himself has the good sense to watch his back from here on in. He doesn’t need to be the next Theo Van Gogh.)

When you look at the faces of the others in the room visible on the video, you don’t exactly see “profiles in courage.” I would wager, however, that if you asked each of them individually whether they favored equal rights for women and homosexuals, as well as separation of church and state and liberal democracy and Enlightenment principles in general (all anathema to Shariah), they would uniformly say yes. Further I would imagine they would all be appalled at the idea of a global caliphate under Islam, and therefore the end of Belgium as a sovereign nation, the very intention of Shariah.

Still, political correctness — leavened, to be sure, with a modicum of cowardice — overwhelmed their good sense and allowed the decent and courageous man to leave by himself.

If you ever wondered how Hitler happened, you have part of your answer on this video.

People on the right spend a great deal of time and energy excoriating Hollywood, Broadway, and the music industry. Entertainment has become the province of the Left and is hugely biased.

True enough — but it’s been that way for some time. And with all the complaining by conservatives and libertarian-types it may even have gotten worse in recent years. Certainly, it hasn’t gotten better. Whining, it must be admitted, hasn’t helped.

Many say the answer is to boycott Hollywood — some already have. But when you do that just realize that you are turning your back on the culture and that can have, in fact already has had, drastic results.

As the late — and increasingly lamented — Andrew Breitbart pointed out repeatedly, “Politics is downstream from culture.”

Just how downstream we saw in this year’s election. Virtually every accusation made by the left toward Republicans and conservatives (sexism, racism, greed, etc.) was prepared and nurtured in the realm of culture. That was the earth in which the lies grew and prospered. And those lies, more than any facts or policies, were responsible for a liberal victory in a year — with unemployment at 8 percent and a deficit at 16 trillion — that should have been a Republican rout.

Put simply, give up on the culture and you lose forever. (It’s hard enough with the media and the educational system rigged the way they are.)

So my point is quite simple. Quit bitching and start doing.

Sean Penn and Oliver Stone are going to do what they are going to do. Conservatives and libertarians have to do the same thing — but better.

Sorry about the better, but that’s just the facts right now. Bias exists and you’re going to have to overcome it. The best way to achieve that is by aesthetic excellence. And the only way to achieve that excellence, assuming you have the basic talent, unfortunately is hard work. It all comes down to the old tourist query joke about “How do you get to Carnegie Hall.” (“Practice, practice, practice,” for the twelve people who don’t know it).

Whoever said it was going to be easy? And making it more difficult is that conservatives tend to be out of practice where cultural endeavors are concerned (except perhaps in country music, which is important). When you disdain or ignore something, the skills wither.

We all know the old saw, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

But how about “Fool me two dozen times and you’re the Stupid Party!” (aka, the GOP)?

The Republicans certainly did their best to prove the latter in election 2012.

And how were they fooled? The last election was arguably over and done before the real battle started when the mainstream media overtly and covertly made mincemeat of the Republican candidates during the primary debates, effectively neutering them for the main event.

Well, except for, momentarily, Newt Gingrich, who provided the one intellectually stimulating moment during that tedious and seemingly interminable series of events when he called the media out. That, unfortunately, could only be effective once.

Otherwise, the MSM performed the role of an unopposed air force in a softening up operation against a Third World country before the ground troops are brought in to mop up. And they did it well. (Yes, I know it was a “close” election, but in an economy with 8 percent unemployment and 16-trillion dollar deficits, it should have been a Republican wipeout.)

The extraordinary thing is that the GOP leadership allowed this to happen when a reasonable person could see it coming so far off he could have read War and Peace twice.

It was like nominating George Stephanopoulos to be the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Might as well go Full Monty and make it Chris Matthews next time.

The first thing the GOP has to do to win in 2016 is put an absolute, dead stop, end to this.

How?

To begin with, learn who your friends and enemies are. (Yes, I also know we’re supposed to keep our friends close and our enemies closer. But that doesn’t mean you give your enemy your daughter to sleep with.) Then, obviously, you set up your own party debates your way. Keep the MSM as far away as the nearest leper colony.

Then what do you do?

I don’t recommend putting Hannity, O’Reilly, and the Fox News crew front and center. However you may feel about them — I, like many people, have different feelings about different ones — they are celebrities. You don’t want the media to shine, even if they’re on your side. They’re unelected and will be there for decades anyway (sigh). You want the candidates to shine – and their ideas.

One approach might be to start with a list of intelligent right-of-center people who will ask reasonable questions eliciting substantive responses. You can find them in abundance at such places as the National Review, the Weekly Standard, Breitbart.com, Townhall.com, HotAir.com, RedState.com, and, to be self-serving, PJMedia.com. There are plenty more, including, naturally, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages.

Hypocrisy is rife in American politics, particularly on the Left.

We are by now used to the likes of Oliver Stone and Sean Penn — who themselves live, quite literally, like Medici princes — spewing endless neo-Marxist drivel like sophomores at a four a.m. reefer klatsch. (Most recently, Stone has unleashed upon the public the eponymous Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, a work best described as “Stalin porn.”)

Perhaps more significantly we are used to the giant leftist hypocrisy of supporting supposedly exploited Third World nations that themselves espouse and seek globally to expand virtually everything leftists claim to abhor (misogyny, homophobia, theocracy, etc.). Go figure.

But the Right is guilty of its own kind of hypocrisy. It’s interesting how some of those who most vociferously object to government interference in our economic affairs are most desirous of government interference in our personal ones.

I’m referring of course to social conservatives, who want to legislate our morals and values according to their views.

To be clear, I am quite sympathetic to the social conservative argument on abortion. Life, it appears to me, does begin at the moment of conception. (I can’t think of another time.) And at whatever phase of pregnancy an abortion occurs, a choice must be made between human lives, a horrible, and perforce immoral, situation.

I am less sympathetic to the social conservative position on same-sex marriage, which seems to me a civil rights issue.

But hold your tongues (and you blog comments) for a moment. Arguing my positions on these issues is not my intention here.

My point is: The social issues, whatever your position, are best dealt with outside the governmental realm.

I realize this is an unattainable goal and that government will always intrude in our private lives to some degree, but we must fight against it as much as possible for several reasons.

To begin with, social conservatives will be vastly more successful at having their views accepted if they make their case extrinsic of government.

Don’t believe me? Well, most of us remember “Mind your own beeswax!” from grammar school. That made an impression for a reason. People resent intrusion in their private lives to the extent that they often will do just the opposite of what was sought or recommended.  Generally, people don’t want anonymous others, folks they barely know, the government most of all, telling them what to do about matters that are extremely personal. They would prefer to hear that from close friends, family, clergy and healthcare professionals they know and respect. Wouldn’t you?

This is a great part of the explanation for why the Republican/conservative side lost in the election, although the popularity of the pro-life position has grown considerably since the 1970s. Democrats may hold the nanny state prize for our economic lives, but Republicans were given the nanny state prize for our private lives. We are the busybodies.

Unfair? Sure, considering the idiotic intrusions of the likes of Michael Bloomberg who wants to tell us how much soda pop we can drink. Also, because we’re really not, at least not most of us.

But the perception is real, especially among women. The rise of the bogus women’s issues during the campaign around such absurdities as free contraception (how about free cigars?) were made possible by this same perception.

Republicans have been losing the (majority) women’s vote for years and it is only going to get worse if we don’t take the social issues off the table and put them back where they belong — at home.

Just in time for the holidays, The New Criterion’s new literary line Criterion Books is publishing their initial offering, THE PARTY LINE, a two-act play by my wife Sheryl Longin and me.

Intermingling real and fictional characters, THE PARTY LINE takes place in Moscow and New York in the Twenties and Thirties and Amsterdam in the early years of this millennium.

Two of the prominent real characters in the play are Walter Duranty — the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent of that earlier era — and Pim Fortuyn — the Dutch politician assassinated in 2002 on the brink of becoming prime minister of that country.

The most important fictional character is Sid Brody, another foreign correspondent in Moscow during that earlier period. His character was based loosely on Eugene Lyons, the former UPI reporter who wrote several books on the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

THE PARTY LINE is just now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with ebook versions available shortly. The introduction was written by our own Ron Radosh.

Two reviews have already appeared that I commend to your attention – one here by Bruce Bawer and another at City Journal by Stefan Kanfer. More will hopefully be forthcoming.

Through the published version of THE PARTY LINE we hope to generate enthusiasm for the work that will encourage a major production. We are under no illusions. The cost of the production of a serious play on Broadway or the London’s West End is steep, especially one that takes seven actors (doing multiple roles) as this one does.

But if you read it, I think you will understand why Sheryl and I think it is worth the effort.

Has Benghazi helped Israel?

It’s hard to calculate the amount, but it seems likely that the evolving Libyan scandal has been useful to Israel in its struggle with Hamas in Gaza.

The embarrassing — even humiliating — mishandling and subsequent misnaming of the terror attack on the U.S. consulate/CIA installation has made the administration look quite ridiculous in its claim that al-Qaeda and similar Islamic extremist organizations were on the run. With four Americans dead in Benghazi, the reverse appears to be true.

Sympathy for Islamofascists is not at a high point and, consequently, Barack Obama, not always Benjamin Netanyahu’s best friend, has been remarkably understanding of Operation Pillar of Defense, affirming, while in Thailand, that “we are fully supportive” of Israel’s right to act against Hamas.

During an interview I conducted Monday with David Siegel, Israel’s consul general for the southwestern U.S., Mr. Siegel, one of the Jewish state’s key diplomats in this country, was effusive in his praise regarding the president’s solidarity with Israel in its current struggle. (The interview is now available here on PJTV.)

We will see how this plays out in the next few days when the inevitable pushback occurs, but conservatives, who were in such strong opposition to Obama in part because of his Middle East policy, may have to eat a small portion, at least, of crow.

The Israelis also have to thank Obama to a degree for the better treatment they are getting from the mainstream media this time around, for the moment anyway. Yes, the New York Times (probably the most reactionary institution in our country today) remains blissfully unaware of the presence of terrorists in the Gaza Strip, bellowing on about the destruction of media buildings by Israeli forces without noting that shielding themselves inside the buildings were four senior leaders of Islamic Jihad.

And yes, CNN bought yet another Pallywood production hook, line and sinker, years after the notorious Mohammed al Dura case and the “Green” man in the Lebanon War and who knows how many other incredibly obvious counterfeits. Anderson Cooper should don a dunce cap for this and spend a long time in the corner.

Through it all, you have the sense the media is chomping at the bit to go forward with their traditional anti-Israeli narrative, but Obama’s attitude is impeding them for the moment. Who knows how long it will last? But everything possible should be done to encourage the president’s new outlook.

Of course, there would be no Gaza War ever if Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et. al. did not lob missiles at Israeli civilians day in and day out to provoke one. Israel would have no interest in fighting otherwise. Only Hamas would. And only Hamas does, by creating a deliberately asymmetrical war that results, again deliberately, in the killing and maiming of its own people for the benefit of the media.

For McLuhan, the media was the message. For Hamas, the message is the media publicizing their message.

Apparently, David Petraeus doesn’t just lie about his private life. He also at least airbrushes the truth when it comes to national security, telling the House Intelligence Committee that he always said Benghazi was a terrorist attack.

Rep. Peter King – who attended both Petraeus’ testimony Friday and the former DCIA’s briefing to lawmakers on Sept. 14 — has a more jaundiced view:

Petraeus’ testimony both challenges the Obama administration’s repeated claims that the attack was a “spontaneous” protest over an anti-Islam video, and according to King conflicts with his own briefing to lawmakers on Sept. 14. Sources have said Petraeus, in that briefing, also described the attack as a protest that spun out of control.

“His testimony today was that from the start, he had told us that this was a terrorist attack,” King said, adding that he told Petraeus he had a “different recollection.”

But never mind the self-serving shifting sands of the increasingly slimy general. The lede from the same Fox story is the important news:

Former CIA Director David Petraeus testified in a closed-door hearing Friday morning that his agency determined immediately after the Sept. 11 Libya attack that “Al-Qaeda involvement” was suspected — but the line was taken out in the final version circulated to administration officials, according to a top lawmaker who was briefed.

There’s your smoking gun, as the saying goes. Someone, or ones, somewhere redacted that crucial line.

Who?

Dear Mr. Netanyahu,

I’m an American citizen and over 60, so I am pretty much useless (though I still play a decent game of tennis), but I want to volunteer for the IDF.

I understand you’re having some trouble on your southern border that seems to be creeping north with sirens wailing in Tel Aviv and, unlike a number of my fellow Jews in this country, I would do anything to help.

I am perfectly clear that your cause is just and the time is now. In fact, unlike an even larger number of my fellow citizens — and quite probably our president — I am perfectly clear that your cause is also ours. You are fighting for freedom and democracy against the most reactionary forces in the world today: those that oppose the rights of women and gays, religious freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and assembly, etc., etc., and wish to impose theocratic totalitarianism.

You would think everybody would be on your side. But no. Forces of “progressivism” like the New York Times are — even today, while Israel has endured 275 and counting missiles aimed at civilians — questioning your judgment.

It’s hard to say why they do this. Perhaps their management — themselves Jewish — are embarrassed by their heritage. They were the same folks, you no doubt recall as the son of a historian, who took a “moderate approach” when reporting on the Holocaust.

But I suspect it is more than that. After all, their vision of Israel is not unlike that of much of our elite media. The Europeans, for the most part, are even worse.

So that leaves your support to us here in the great unwashed, the non-elite public who may not have read Marcuse or Chomsky, and see the justice of your cause through simple common sense.