... P.J. O'Rourke comes dangerously close to throwing both of them out in his post-election article at the Weekly Standard.

I'm a big P.J. Fan, but I hate to see that he's apparently one of the many who's missed the point. The problem with the current American political climate isn't social conservatism, regardless of how well (and with how much nuance) P.J. tries to sell the idea:

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights...

Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

...In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

Well, no. I don't agree. The problem with conservatives isn't that our social values are too rigid. The problem is that we're too willing to concede, compromise and surrender.

Conservatives will continue to marginalize and undermine ourselves as long as we're willing to support liberals (McCain, Dubya) because they're preferable to radicals (Obama, Kerry, Howard Dean). If we keep showing the Republican party that we'll vote for whichever schmuck they throw our way, why should they bother trying to cultivate real leadership?

Make no mistake, the Republican party deserved to lose this election. I am sick to my stomach of having to vote for the lesser of two evils.

If anyone argues that the modern GOP or American conservatives have betrayed Reagan, I'm inclined to agree. But don't try to tell me that conservatives have betrayed Reagan by adhering too closely to his values.

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