Conservatives Down But Not Out

This is no time to stop fighting …

I Was a Mole at the Conservative Summit: They’re Not Dead Yet, on DKos.

Excerpts:

Gingrich launches into a scorching denunciation of consultants (much like you’d hear in the progressive blogosphere), and calls for an intellectual renaissance in conservatism. And he argues that the conservative revival can only come from outside the Beltway … to this end, Newt has launched a new 527 (American Solutions for Winning the Future), a nationwide training program for conservative leaders fifty times the size of GOPAC, using advanced communications technology to hold it all together.

Here we see again the conservative reaction to Katrina as self-fulfilling prophesy. All Katrina proved was that conservative government doesn’t work, because conservatives don’t believe that government can work. Would you trust a doctor who didn’t believe in medicine?

Paul Ryan, the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, suggests that the American people now view the Republican Party as the party of big government. This is good news, he argues! It means that voters threw the Republicans out because voters want small government. (Congressman Ryan must live in a world with a very pretty sky indeed.) This is a chance, Ryan tells us, for the GOP to get rid of the deadweight, to “go back to the wilderness” and rediscover itself.

For conservatives, ideological warfare against progressives is linked to the war within. I’ve been looking forward to this session. Sager is the author of The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party. a great look at the dilemma currently facing Republicans and conservatives. It’s very much a mirror image of Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, urging Republicans to avoid getting bogged down in the South and to focus on winning the West.

It goes on & on. You gotta read the whole thing.