One thing that I’ve noticed in the blogsphere is how many people don’t like “deal-makers.”

Deal-makers are a vanishing breed. Some were centrists, but there could also be people who firmly on one ideological perspective or another. The late Ted Kennedy was a fierce liberal, but he was willing more often than not to work with conservatives to get the job done.

But in reading both in passing and more indepth, you get the sense that those politicians who make deals with the other side are people to be reviled. Ross Douthat, is a young conservative that has come up with some great policies that I believe could benefit the Republican Party in the long run. Nevertheless, he tends to look derisively at centrist Republicans seeing them as persons without principle. This is what he wrote in a piece last year after Arlen Specter’s defection:

The larger species to which he belonged — Republicanus Rockefellus, the endangered Northeastern moderate — likewise has little to offer a party in distress. Indeed, if you listen carefully to high-profile Yankee moderates like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lincoln Chafee, who fanned out across op-ed pages and TV shows last week to bemoan their marginalization, it seems as though they don’t even understand their own political situation, let alone the Republican Party’s.

The Northeastern moderates tend to style themselves as fiscal conservatives, spinning a narrative in which they’re the victims of a doctrinaire social conservatism and its litmus tests. But many of them are just instinctive liberals who happen to have ancestral ties to the Grand Old Party. Chafee fit that bill; so did former Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who amassed a distinctly left-wing record after he bolted the Republican Party in 2001 to become an “independent.” For that matter, so does the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a New England native and Republican appointee who often gets described as a moderate, but boasts the jurisprudence of a reliable liberal.

Others, like Collins and Snowe and (until last week) Specter, are simply horse-traders and deal-cutters, whose willingness to cross party lines last month to vote for $800 billion dollars in deficit spending tells you most of what you need to know about their supposed fiscal conservatism. They’re politically savvy but intellectually vacuous. Their highest allegiance isn’t to limited government. It’s to meeting the party in power halfway, while making sure that the dollars keep flowing to their constituents back home.

As I wrote back then, I agreed that the stimulus bill was a rather bad piece of legislation. That said the three GOP Senators who backed it, tried to make deals to make it less bad. Douthat assails the three for not being true fiscal conservatives, but seemingly ignores the other more “loyal partisans” who basically did the same thing for years when the GOP was in power.

Douthat along with writers like Daniel Larison, see these deal-making centrists as lacking any principle instead of self interest. Now, in the case of Arlen Specter, there is some truth to that. Specter is nothing more than a rank opportunist that tries to save his own skin when the going gets rough. But I think it is a little too harsh to say that all centrists or those who want to make deals are some how defective and lack any sense of principle.

Politicians aren’t defective, but the public is.

The problem here is that we the people, liberals and conservatives, tend to think we are the only ones around. We live around people who are like us politically and ideologically and tend to look at the other side as either delusional or evil. So when we elect our representatives to the statehouse or to Washington, we expect them to be partisans and not politicians.

While I respect bloggers like Douthat and conservative bloggers, they are part of the problem. They forget that in a democracy, politicians have to deal with competing interests. What politicians are called to do is to mediate between those cacaphony of interests and desires and produce legislation that benefits the most people. It means that politicos have to learn to tolerate and compromise. This something a blogger sitting in their apartment don’t ever have to face.

Would I love some conservative political ideas to become policy? Sure. But I also know that I live with liberals who are as much Americans as I am. Their voices have to be heard and I leave it up to my elected officials to work something out that I can live with and so can my liberal husband.

It’s interesting elections are starting to be seen as mandates handed down from God. Both Democrats and Republicans see political victories as some kind of divine sign that they can do anything they want-after all, didn’t that election justify their viewpoint? It’s symptom of a public that is walled off from other ideas and ideologies.

In 2008, Bill Bishop wrote the book, The Big Sort. In it, he explained that over the last 30 years, American society has sorted itself along ideological lines. We now live in like minded communities and that has had an impact on Washington. One those impacts is how it has taken out the dealmakers who made legislation possible. He uses the example of the Nuer Tribe in Africa to talk about the role American politicians used to play:

Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage. Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate ways the Nuer encouraged cooperation and resolved conflicts.

The Nuer put special faith in a group of arbiters known as “men of the earth.” Men of the earth had no formal powers. They couldn’t arrest people or make arbitrary decisions. But the Nuer granted these people a kind of local authority to settle disputes. If a fight broke out, a man of the earth could stop the conflict by running between the combatants and hoeing a line in the dirt. If a tribal member was killed in a fight, a man of the earth arbitrated compensation to be paid by the winner to the dead man’s family.

The “man of the earth” was a deal-maker, a negotiator, a compromiser. He was the person given the job of representing all the conflicting interests of the tribes.

A man of the earth was a politician.

He then goes on to explain what has happened in America since the 1970s:

Over the last 30 years, most communities have grown either more Democratic or more Republican. Through an incremental process of migration and self-selection, people have clustered in like-minded neighborhoods, clubs, and churches.

Migration had consequences. Legislative districts grew more lopsided, and they elected more-partisan representatives. Politicians no longer mediated competing interests in their districts. They represented increasingly one-sided constituencies that grew more extreme in their ideological isolation.

The meaning of politics changed. Voters didn’t want men of the earth. They wanted partisans.

And he’s right. We the people don’t want deal makers, “men of the earth.” We want partisans. This is probably the main reasons that moderates of both parties have been squeezed out of politics. As the deal makers leave the scene and are replaced by partisans, the political process grinds to a halt.

Bishop notes that the Nuer tended to see that they had the ground between them in common:

The earth was what the Nuer had in common. If locusts swarmed or a drought persisted, every tribe suffered. When the grass was thick, they all prospered. They were called “men of the earth,” anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote, because “the earth, undivided as the basis of society, (symbolized) not individual prosperity, fertility, and good fortune, but the general prosperity, fertility, and good fortune on which individual life depends.”

What do Americans have in common today? Not much. Oh, we share a lot with our neighbors, with the people at our church. Too much, in fact. But we don’t know fellow citizens just a few counties over. It takes a “social experiment” in some parts to imagine how it would be to live as a member of a different political party.

A politicians do have an ideological background that should be around to inform their decision-making. But at the end of the day, Democrats and Republicans have to do what is good for all of the nation, not just those who agree with them.

At some point, we have to start seeing the deal makers not as traitors, but as trying to be do what they do best: trying to take our various voices and make them one.

Nice story about a showdown at CPAC between GOProud and the National Organization for Marriage.

“If we are able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo.  It will break him.”

Sen. Jim DeMint, July 2009

Obama took office a on a wave of popular euphoria.  Even among McCain supporters, there was hope that a sixteen-year era of ever-escalating White House ineptitude might be coming to a close.  Fate had laid in his lap a cooperative Congress, a sympathetic electorate, and a long list of critical, but very solvable problems that had been waiting for a grown-up President.  He was set up to be a hero and he seemed like a guy who could possibly deliver.

The Fates can be cruel.  By the summer of ’09, Obama was presented with a dangerous present.  A lengthy recount sent Democrat Al Franken to Washington as the Senator from Minnesota.  The Democrats now had 60 votes in the Senate, enough to overcome a Republican filibuster and push through legislation on a party-line vote.

This was a temptation to arrogance.  Obama was faced with a basket of problems whose solutions could have helped unite and strengthen the country.  A few examples are energy independence, mending relations with our allies, redefining our relationship with China, updated financial industry regulation, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, challenging Iran over nuclear weapons and democracy, working through the collapse of the housing bubble; the list goes on and on.

Finding reasonable solutions to a quarter of these problems might have been accomplished in a couple of years and would have been enough by itself to seal a legacy.  But looming on the horizon were the two Big Ones, federal spending and health care.  Both problems would require solutions that, if real, would be broadly unpopular.  Both are complex and technical with no genuine fix that would fit entirely within either party’s ideology.  Both threaten to engulf the Republic over a long time frame, but are manageable in the near term.

There was never much possibility that Obama would choose to use his Congressional majority to tackle the spending issue.  And on healthcare, an experienced leader might have looked at the situation and recognized a trap.  Someone who knew and understood not just Washington, but the mood of the American people would see that 60 Senate votes are not enough to reform our health care system.  Even more, he would have seen that there was no coherent plan at the ready.

The wise move would have been to solve some problems, establish credibility, develop a solid health care plan over time, and have the patience to find solutions that could be built on a broad consensus.

But a federal healthcare overhaul was the one Big Government project that Democrats had wanted for more than half a century and had never been able to achieve.  It seemed like it was within their grasp.

Except that people didn’t want it.  Not that they didn’t want to address the problem, but it wasn’t a pressing issue for most Americans.  They didn’t understand the options and hadn’t had time to digest them.  We quickly got the impression that an enormous chunk of the US economy was about to be completely remodeled on the fly, affecting everyone, without serious thought or anything approaching consensus.

The temptation was too much.  Obama stepped in the trap.  Now his Administration is a wreck.  For reasons that completely escape me, Democrats seem convinced that they can’t walk away from an effort to pass an unpopular healthcare bill no matter how ridiculous the effort becomes.  Lacking the votes to overcome a filibuster, they may try to ram it through the Senate on a procedural move, but I doubt they are either desperate or foolish enough to cross that line.

The President is losing popularity, bogged down on a single issue, unable to move any of the rest of his agenda, and generally ineffective.  It is beginning to look like his Waterloo.

But Obama doesn’t face an election this year and there is a fresh gift for him on the horizon.  Our government functions poorly when Congress and the White House are held by the same political party and he lacked the mettle to overcome that calculus.  But the Democrats’ domination of Congress is almost certain to end this fall.  What’s more, we can expect to see some new Republican faces in the Scott Brown-mold.  Republicans from places like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Connecticut are likely to find themselves in Congress again; Republicans independent of the more radical ideologies that have warped the Party in recent years.

In the end this story could read less like Napoleon at Waterloo than like Clinton after ’94.  Since I feel some confidence Obama won’t molest any interns, this shift could have more positive consequences than the Clinton years, both for the country and for the Republican Party.  Next year, a weakened, humbled, and probably more sober Barack Obama may get a fresh opportunity to prove his bi-partisan credentials.  With a strong and more reasonable Republican presence in Congress he may be forced to tackle issues that the country can unite behind.

There is reason to hope that on the other side of this absurd healthcare spectacle, Democrats and Republicans may find a climate that will help both parties better serve us all.

Republicans United is now on Twitter!  Please follow us @ http://www.twitter.com/GOPUnited

There has been a lot of press lately on Indiana Republican Governor Mitch Daniels as a possible candidate in the 2012 Presidential race. What I personally like about the guy is that he shows the a conservative can do more than give red meat speeches, they can actually govern. What interests me most is his novel solution to health care. Called the Healthy Indiana Plan, it uses Health Care Savings accounts plus catastrophic insurance to give people access to health insurance.

Will he run? Don’t know. He might be too nice to run for President. But it would be nice to have a conservative wonk spouting out ideas on how to govern for a change.

There has been a lot of talk about Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist leaving the GOP and running as an independent for Senate. A campaign spokesperson is saying such rumors are not true and seem to come out when bad news comes out about Marco Rubio, Crist’s conservative challenger in the GOP primary. The Miami Herald ran a story about Rubio charging personal items on the state GOP credit card when he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.

This is what Crist spokeswoman Andrea Saul had to say:

“I believe the Rubio campaign stirs up rumors whenever it’s convenient for them. I’ve been asked about these rumors since my first day on the job. It’s been proven throughout this time that it’s a concerted effort from the Rubio campaign as evidenced by their most recent effort to buy ads about it on Drudge.”

The web ad on the Drudge Report that Saul was referring to was a link to a poll that asked Florida readers to vote on whether they thought Crist might leave the party to improve his chances of being elected.

The ads were not bought by Rubio but were paid for through independent expenditures from Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) Senate Conservative Fund political action committee. DeMint has endorsed Rubio in the Senate primary.

As for Rubio, this is a snippet of that story:

U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio charged grocery bills, repairs to the family minivan and purchases from a wine store less than a mile from his West Miami home to the Republican Party of Florida while he was speaker of the Florida House, according to records obtained by The Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times.

Rubio said Wednesday that he paid for all personal expenses billed to an American Express card given to him by the party to use from 2005 to 2008 when he left public office. The rest of the charges, he said, were legitimate party expenses…

Rubio also booked six plane tickets for his wife using the card. It was unclear how many, if any, of those trips his wife actually took; in some instances, she did not fly and Rubio was credited by the airline.

“My wife was the First Lady of the Florida House of Representatives and it is absolutely appropriate for her to accompany me to official events and party functions,” Rubio said.

So is the “independent rumor” a ploy to get people to forget about Rubio’s problems? I don’t know. But it is nice to see that Crist is staying in the party.

The whole notion of bipartisanship has taken a beating these days from folks on the left and the right.  Indeed, in this age of hyper-partisanship, folks tend to punish those who dare cooperate with the other side. 

But there is still a desire among many in the Great American Middle for some form of bipartisanship, a way where the two sides can come together and make a deal that will benefit all of America.

So, what does a politician do to fulfill that desire?  You play pretend bipartisanship and hope no one notices its just for show.  That’s the basis of a recent Political article which focuses on the healthcare debate and how both the left and the right have done what they can to thrwart real bipartisanship.

Carrie Budhof Brown shows how outside forces killed the one real chance for bipartisanship on reforming health care:

In fact, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana tried the bipartisan route. He spent almost nine months trying to bring a handful of Republicans onto the bill, and had the support of Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid in doing it — to an extent. The theory was that if Baucus could persuade Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to come on board, other Republicans in both chambers would follow.

Until July, the approach looked promising. But a cascade of decisions threw it off course.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told conservative activists that they needed to make health care Obama’s Waterloo, infuriating Democrats who saw the remarks as the first public sign that Republicans had no plans to support the bill.

It was around this time that Baucus faced increased pressure from Reid and the White House to wrap up the Gang of Six negotiations, angering Republicans who didn’t want to be rushed.

But the Republicans involved in talks — Snowe, Grassley and Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming — were also being squeezed. When it appeared that the group was nearing a compromise, McConnell reined them in, extracting guarantees from Grassley and Enzi that they would not sign off on a deal without consent from the caucus, according to congressional aides.

Partisans on both sides charge the other is not really engaging with the other. They present themselves as the pure and honest one, while the other side refuses to listen to them.

The whole game these days is to appear that you are trying to extend the olive branch, while at the same time reining in those who even dare to try to persue real bipartisanship.

The thing is, real bipartisanship means coming together, listen to each other and realizing that you aren’t going to get the whole loaf. But in this age when what matters is to win, what matters is trying to make sure the other side gets nothing. It’s the ultimate in zero-sum games.

I am probably one of the dreaded “Broderites” who thinks that real bipartisanship is a worthy thing. Why? Because even if one side wins a majority of seats in Congress and wins the White House, they have to contend with another side that also won seats. They might not have won the majority, but they were still elected by their districts to do a job. We are not a parlimentary system where the winner takes all. The winner might have advantages, but they still have to cooperate with the minority. Too many think that because one party might have a commanding majority, that they don’t have to listen to the minority. But that is not how our govermental structure is set up. The minority might be less in number, but they have been elected in their states and districts. They have to be listened to and heeded.

Some of the blame also has to placed on a partisan public that does not want bipartisanship. What they want is for the “losing side” to basically get out of the way and shut up and through blogs and membership groups, they make sure that anyone who works with the other side is punished.

I don’t have an answer for this. All I can say is that there needs to be a price paid for squashing bipartisanship. Until that happens, expect more staged showings of bipartisanship.

• Health Care Costs Too Much.
• Too Many Americans Who Want Health Care can’t afford it.

For over a year, a great portion of the American polity has dedicated its time to addressing those two statements. Thousands of speeches, millions of pages of text and who-knows-how-many bytes of data have been generated to express the feelings of those on both sides of the aisle. Our political system has ground nearly to a halt amidst the debate.

Health care reform is not a new issue. Teddy Roosevelt sparred with his opponents on the topic over century ago. Harry Truman tried reforming the system. Bill and Hillary Clinton tried it. Since we’re still talking about it, I think we know just how much success any of those folks had.

Now, into this fray comes President Barack Obama who, after more than year’s worth of debate (during his Administration) has waded into the debate and is, today, holding a one-day, bipartisan Health Care symposium to cut through the muck and solve this problem. One-day. To solve a century-old problem. Some would say that this the kind of bold action that needs to be taken if we’re ever going to make progress. “Fortune favors the bold” someone once said. I believe someone looking at this plan would not see it as “bold,” but see it for what it is: naive.

Democrats have criticized Senator Orrin Hatch and other Republicans who have said we should toss out the 2,000+ page documents supported by the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House, as well as the White House’s Frankenstein’s Monster which blends the worst of both documents and start over. Lamar Alexander argued fairly persuasively for starting over today at the White House Symposium:

The American political class, at this moment, is not up to this debate. Everyone is so busy trying to score points or rehash the past that no one is willing to really help move this argument forward. Watch this exchange between the President and Senator McCain from today’s meeting for proof that the grown-ups are not in charge of this debate.

But here’s what I predict will happen at the end of the day: Democrats will say Republicans didn’t listen to them. Republicans will say Democrats didn’t listen to them. The Democrats will then try to pass Health Care Reform through Reconciliation. Shouting will then recommence.

I’m sure those of you have children or who have younger siblings recognize this as the HHMNHHMF Cycle: The “He Hit Me…No He Hit Me First” Cycle. Often that Cycle ends with both kids shouting for a Grown-up to break it up and find a solution for everyone. Other times it ends in fisticuffs which a grown-up then has to break-up.

On behalf of everyone, I’m officially calling for a Grown-Up. The Grown-Up Solution is what I asked for back in August and am asking for now. We need this entire process to be taken out of the hands of politicians and put back into the hands of people who know these issues. A bipartisan commission led by Medical professionals who have been public policy experts would bring a gravitas that no politicized symposium cold ever have, no matter how “bi-partisan.” They should be given a year and told that at the end of that year, they should provide Congress with a series of suggested remedies to the Health Care crisis. Then Congress can haggle over how much we can afford to do and in what time frame. But there would be no question about the sincerity or the necessity of the proposals.

America Needs the “Grown-UP Solution.” Who’s with me?

You really don’t want to get in John McCain’s bad side- at least when you are challenging him for Senate.

Bully for McCain.

Richard Ivory, the founder of HipHopRepublican.com makes the case for ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Here’s a snippet:

“Don’t ask Don’t Tell” at its core violates the very principles of liberty itself which are the very concepts our solders fight for every day. Serving openly does not mean flaunting ones sexuality in another’s’ face. What it means, to the contrary, is that all who serve- be they gay or straight- will be held to the same standards of civic and military propriety. If there are policies against public sexual behavior in the military then everyone should be held up to the same standard. Many supporters of “Don’t ask Don’t Tell” wrongly assume that the policy simply refers to a public admission of being homosexual.

This assumption, however, is a misnomer. The truth is that the policy goes much deeper, and creeps into the private lives of thousands of men and women who serve this nation. Unbeknownst to many, while the policy does not explicitly prohibit homosexuals from being in the military it does prohibit “expressions of homosexuality”. Such “expressions” are not reserved for military life on the base but also include off- base activities. It is in its inclusion of all off-base activities that the policy losses all sense of sanity. Clearly, if a person is gay he or she will, at some point, seek companionship and friendship with others like themselves.

I don’t normally like to sites like Big Government or its sister site, Big Journalism.  They tend to be a bit too bombastic for my tastes.

That said, this post by Bruce  Carroll makes a strong point about the whole Ryan Sorba incident last weekend.  He goes as far as saying that it was a “tipping point” within conservatism.  I don’t know if it has made that big of a difference, but I do think it is an important event.  But as Carroll points out, many on the Gay Left tended to do what Andrew Sullivan did, focus on Sorba’s incendiary comments on not on the response of the crowd.

There was a time that I scratched my head about something like this.  I used to think that those on the Gay Left truly wanted to see an American Right that rid itself of homophobia.  I still think there are a lot of people on the left that do want a homophobic-free Right, but many don’t seem to care and want to focus on the dark side and nothing else.

It reminds me a scene from C.S. Lewis’ last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, the Last Battle.  In that book, several people were tossed into a dank stable.  At least that’s what the elves thought.  For the others that were in the stable, they saw a wonderful meadow.  They rejoiced at their surroundings, while the elves remained huddled in what they thought was a stable.

I think there are many that will still see conservatism as a hateful collection of individuals who plot to destroy gays.  Of course such people exist, but there are others that are fighting to stand up to hatred with in conservatism.  I don’t know if what happened this last weekend made any difference or was a “tipping point.”  Nevertheless,  it should be celebrated.  Whenever people stand up against hatred, it should be welcomed, not ignored.

Crossposted at The Moderate Republican

Walter Russell Mead shares his perspective on the Tea Parties and American populism in general. Long story short, those of us who are wary of the Tea Parties may not be pleased with the article, but we would be foolish to ignore what Mead says.

The annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting in Washington is like Spring Break for uptight right-wing political nerds.  Historically it has been the kind of place politicians need to appease, but try to avoid.  George Bush, Sr., spoke there in the years leading up to his election, then gave it a pass.  McCain skipped it in ’07, but felt compelled to go (and take his blows) when he campaigned in ’08.  It is hard to maintain the impression that you are a credible national leader when your televised speech at a political convention is followed by some guy passionately demanding we replace the income tax and return to the gold standard.

In recent years CPAC has shifted toward the center of the Republican political universe.  That’s not because the organization has grown more rational.  It’s as bizarre as ever.  But CPAC is perhaps the last major, vital, conservative organization that remains independent of the fundamentalist movement.  Give it a couple more years, but for now it remains a preserve of the libertarian, rather than the fundamentalist fringe.

This year’s event may be the strangest ever.  With global communism more than twenty years dead, the extremists in the Party are finally growing tired of kicking its corpse.   Yet they still can’t find a decent ideological enemy – and these people are nothing without an enemy.  It’s not easy to find an appropriate bogeyman.  Islamic Fundamentalism is scary, violent, and exotic, but it poses no convincing domestic political threat.  Besides, emphasizing Islamic Fundamentalism raises politically uncomfortable questions about Christian Fundamentalism.  Few of us on the right want to deal with that right now.

Socialism is good, but it’s hard to tell what it means anymore.  None of the CPAC attendees are lining up to give back their Social Security, their Medicare, or their student loans.  Nobody is in a hurry to embrace Socialism, but they also aren’t in a hurry to define it.

So who is the enemy du jour?  Wait for it…this is priceless -

Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.  Seriously.  If your response to that revelation is “who?,” you’re not alone.  What did Wilson and Roosevelt do to destroy America?  Well, in reality, nothing.  But reality, like the “liberal media”, is not welcome at CPAC.  The trial-narrative from this year’s meeting, best defined by millionaire blowhard Glenn Beck, is that Wilson and Roosevelt were “Progressives.”  That means they favored having government take all your stuff and tell you what to do.  Ergo, these Progressives are evil.  They must be opposed at all costs.

The reality, as if it matters is that these early 20^th-century “progressives” were both Republicans and Democrats.  They are the people who brought us safer medicines, gave women the vote, saved capitalism from monopolies, and got the salmonella out of your canned goods. I know.  Shudder.

Maybe they’ll come up with a better enemy next year.

The intellectual confusion at CPAC reflects the disintegration that is rocking the GOP.  We are becoming addicted to the idea of politics as entertainment.  We don’t think we can win an election if we aren’t promoting one passionate, exciting “revolution” or another.  Whatever conservatism may be, it isn’t about the wholesale re-engineering of the social contract every four years.

It is deflating to realize that the great ideological conflicts that have rocked the Western world for centuries are mostly resolved.  What’s left for us to work out, things like – what rules should apply to the healthcare system, how much mortgage backed securities the Fed should repurchase, how could we replace the alternative minimum tax – is frankly rather dull.  People who make a living getting us riled up about politics are sounding crazier and crazier because they have less and less to work with.

Most of the problems that have been left to us require adult thinking, compromise, and hard work, not high-powered firearms and solid aim.  That’s good news and we should recognize it, if for no other reason than that those who came before us paid a staggering price in blood and courage to achieve this on our behalf.

The bad news is that it’s not too late to screw it all up.  We can still take this gleaming Republic and turn it into Somalia.  There are those on the “right” and the “left” (whatever those terms mean anymore) who will, if we let them, take us there.

The lesson from this year’s CPAC is that the Republican Party, like the country as a whole, needs to grow up and learn to cope with the real world in a responsible way.  We have some genuinely dangerous problems that need attention like runaway debt, a market system undermined by corruption, a rising tide of global terrorism.  These problems won’t submit to cartoon politics.  The Republican Party is the still the best political organization to help us find solutions to these problems, but we have to find the determination to do the hard work and leave behind the crazy rhetoric.

Megan McArdle is correct:

Andrew Sullivan has been doing a lot of blogging about Ryan Sorba, the [expletive deleted] who got up on stage at CPAC to condemn them for inviting GOProud.  Andrew’s mostly given a lot of space to illustrating what a [censored] [redacted] Ryan Sorba is, and I fully agree.  One can only cherish the hope that thirty years from now he will writhe in shame at this performance, and given the vagaries of youth, there is a good chance that eventually, he will.

But [expletive deleted]s getting up at political conferences and saying asinine things are not exactly a surprising happening.  To me, the news story was this:  Sorba got booed off the stage.  At CPAC.  This seems like great news.  So why focus on the sad truth that yes, there are still homophobes out there? (Emphasis mine)

It is kind of interesting that Sullivan ignores the fact that it was young conservatives and libertarians that booed Sorba off the stage. Instead, he focuses on Sorba and his ilk.

To answer Megan’s questions, my guess is that this speaks volumes about Sullivan’s take on conservatism. Over the years, he has soured on American conservatism. Sullivan tends to see things in black and white; a decade ago, he saw liberals in the way that he now sees conservatives. He doesn’t allow for a lot of grey in his world, which means his current falling out with conservatism blinds him to the fact that there were conservatives who spoke out against this idiot.

I think that’s sad; because amidst all the dung that is part of American conservatism, there are some green shoots of hope. Too bad Sully is missing that.