"As the cable shows signed off last night, it was dawning even on the most conventional pundits that the Republicans had not elected an escadrille of Republican archangels..."

"... to descend upon Capitol Hill. It was more like a murder of angry crows. Joni Ernst is not a moderate. David Perdue is not a moderate. Thom Tillis is not a moderate. Cory Gardner -- who spiced up his victory by calling himself 'the tip of the spear' -- is not a moderate. Tom Cotton is not a moderate. And these were the people who flipped the Senate to the Republicans. In the reliably Republican states, Ben Sasse in Nebraska is not a moderate.  James Lankford in Oklahoma is not a moderate. He's a red-haired fanatic who believes that welfare causes school shootings. Several of these people -- most notably, Sasse and Ernst -- won Republican primaries specifically as Tea Partiers, defeating establishment candidates. The Republicans did not defeat the Tea Party. The Tea Party's ideas animated what happened on Tuesday night. What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net. They did nothing except send the Tea Party to finishing school."

Wrote Esquire's Charles P. Pierce, live-blogging the election results. I note that he called Scott Walker "the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin."

Yes, it's interesting to go back and relive Tuesday night from the perspective of someone who — we know in retrospect — is going to get deeply wounded.

A few stray observations about Pierce's style of humor:

1. Why is "red-haired" considered acceptable as an insult?

2. Why is it considered okay to call attention to what seems to be an eye disorder? Whether something is wrong with Scott Walker's eyes or not, the epithet "goggle-eyed" is disrespectful to all of the people who suffer from conditions like esotropia.

3. To speak of teaching the Tea Party "to wear shoes" is to try to be funny by evoking the stereotype of barefoot hillbillies. When will elite urban white people ever get the feeling that it's bigoted to mock rural white people? Oh, the answer is easy. You can find it in the book title "What's the matter with Kansas"? There's something wrong with these people as long as they fail to vote for Democrats.

(By the way, "escadrille" is how you say "squadron" or "small squadron" in French. I'll refrain from adding an anti-French kicker, given my attention to political correctness above.)