When pundits talk about "conservative principles," they are speaking in the abstract.  That's because conservatism as they would have you believe it exists in its pure form has never actually been practiced in the real world.  All those people who call themselves conservatives and espouse conservative dogma?  Not actual conservatives.  So don't blame us for their poor governance.

As I think Jon Chait wrote in his book, "Conservatism cannot fail.  It can only be failed."

"I suppose if you think of the Bush administration as “conservatives,” "

I suppose if you think of Hitler as a "Nazi", then you can argue that Nazism as murderous.

I suppose if you think of Stalin as "Communist", then you can argue that Communism was murderous.

I suppose if you think of ...

Fill in the blank.

This is Orwellian redoing of the language at its most bizarrely brazen.  Run on a "conservative" ticket for eight years; accuse your opponents of every unconservative sin in the world; rally the base under the banner; screw up monumentally; and then denounce the very same eight years as a departure from "conservatism" when your record has been trounced and your incompetence laid manifest before the electorate.

iccy: I like that riposte.

well said, icarusr. I have to agree completely that this effort to denounce the last 8 years of conservative rule as unconservative is a tale spun from whole cloth in order to defend the ideology from imploding upon itself.

What tec619 said, icarusr, a clean shot! ;)

Presidential contests are won by compelling personalities, not by party-perfect ideologues.

Soon enough a compelling conservative will emerge and a real contest will be given either to Obama or his successor.  

the White House will be in play once again and we'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, the past two drubbings also serve to hose out a lot of crap from the GOP stable.  Time now to make a coherent articulation of conservatism.

And a program for walking the walk when power is next achieved.

You need only study the histories of Liberal & Tory & Labor in the UK and our own swings of the pendulum here to see new dogs always turn up to make the other side's day.

Channy:

First, maybe if faux cowboy Dubya wasn't afraid of horses, he could have mucked out the horseshit that piled up in conservative stalls after the Gingrich revolution.  Second, conservatives' incoherence and articulation problems could have been solved it Dubya's lazy ass enrolled in elocution classes. Third, if Dubya bothered to read Greek mythology, rather than "grecian," instead of squandering lives and treasure fulfilling his oedipal revenge plot (Saddam), he'd have known what a Herculean task he faced in cleaning the stables.  :-D

Laugh, Channy, laugh.

I am laughing, tec.

Look, I wish we'd gotten Lincoln.  Maybe you guys got him this time.  Better, for this one, I wish we'd gotten Churchill.

But, even Churchill was turned out rather unceremoniously after he won WW2.  Though, without term limits, he got one more Last Hurrah.

What I'm glad we didn't have after 9/11 was a Bill Clinton.  Someone who would have tried to prosecute a war using polls and daily focus groups.

Bush was admirable in his steadfastness absorbing withering fire year after year.  His enemies call it stubborness, and so be it.  But, even the brilliant Lincoln didn't get his war right until 1864.  Just in time to save his election cookies.

Truman, now almost universally admired, didn't run the Korean War very well.  Eisenhower had to come in to resolve it.  

If Iraq was folly as you believe, then Bush will be seen like those WW1 generals who took horrendous losses for most of four years.  If Iraq proves to have been strategically correct, then his poor prosecution of the war will be forgotten, or at least forgiven,  just as Lincoln's mainly has been.

We don't have to hash out the arguments yet again.  We know each other's positions.  But those are the alternate factors I believe history will ultimately weigh in making its judgement.

No, Bush will never be mistaken for Lincoln or Churchill.  Maybe not even for Truman.  But, perhaps equal to Polk.  Forever criticized.  But, does anyone want to give California and Texas back to Mexico?

Did Clinton prosecute the military intervention in Kosovo by way of polls and focus groups?  My memory is that he did not, but rather made it clear that this was a line in the sand that Milosevic and the Serbian regime and their ethnic paramilitary had crossed.  Conduct of the war was delegated to Clark as NATO commander, who certainly had to deal with a multi-nation worry-circle when it came to targeting for the air war, but I don't think that's the same thing as suggesting that Clinton ran it according to Zogby polls.

I think Clinton was both courageous and correct to bring an end to Milosevic's reign of terror. But he certainly did so with one eye on the polls, which is not in and of itself necessarily bad.

What WAS bad was unilaterally taking ground troops off the table, thereby freeing the Serbs to create a humanitarian catastrophe that could have been avoided, and allow most of the Serb armored force to get off scot free.

No one can make a remotely credible claim that Bush was conservative in anything but talk. Tax cuts without spending cuts is not conservative. Neither is supporting steel tariffs, farm subsidies, massive entitlements growth, and going to war on a credit card in order to bring democracy to places that have never known it.  As a leftist, Bush increased the size of the Federal government by 40%, doubled the national debt and the deficit, sacrificed individual liberties to a giant "security" bureaucracy, sponsored unprecedented Federal intrusion into local education, and has just nationalized the banking system. And etc.

On the conservative side, Bush talked about being opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage, but where is the legislation attached to this rhetoric?

The basic problem here is that we have had for decades now a thinly-disguised single party state, and that party is The Incumbent Party. There is no, zero, significant Federal policy since the New Deal, if not the Civil War, that has not depended on a broad centrist coalition to be realized. All the racket about the vast ideological differences between the parties is just propaganda designed to pump up public interest in the elections, which are worth billions to the various actors in the media/political complex.

irony writes, "...Did Clinton prosecute the military intervention in Kosovo by way of polls and focus groups? "

He fought it entirely from the air, irony.  With fighter-bombers and UAVs (drones).

He could have prosecuted a war like that for two terms without losing more than 1 point.  No body bags, no artificial limbs.  

During that era a smart bomb went right into the window of the Chinese Embassy and killed a diplomate.  The Chinese were none to pleased, but nary a squeak about it in America.

You're going to need a better example than this, irony.  Even Democrats admit that Clinton was the most finger to the wind president in history.  Who was his boy-- Dick (poll and focus group) Morris, remember?

Robert Powell writes, "...No one can make a remotely credible claim that Bush was conservative in anything but talk."

You're absolutely right, RP.  

In this regard, I am being a hedgehog just like he is and defend him solely because he ignored withering fire for six years to carry out and maintain the invasion of Iraq.

I regret that he prosecuted the occupation so poorly until finally putting Petraeus on the case.

I have a good friend who is a congressman.  He told me how competent and smart Petraeus was about five years ago.  It's too bad a congressman knew this, but the president either didn't or waited so long to  put him in command.

FDR catapulted Eisenhower ahead of a few hundred colonels to make a general of him after his superb performance in mock war maneuvers just before Pearl Harbor.  You've got to be on the lookout for talent.

RobertP writes, "...there is no, zero, significant Federal policy since the New Deal, if not the Civil War, that has not depended on a broad centrist coalition to be realized. All the racket about the vast ideological differences between the parties is just propaganda designed to pump up public interest in the elections, which are worth billions to the various actors in the media/political complex."

I'm very much inclined to agree with that, Robert, and have written similar things.  It often seems that politics is if not Bread, Circuses.  Games designed to inflame and amuse us and get us rooting for one team or another.  Just as artificial and arbitrary as the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Given all the appointments by Obama so far, it hardly looks like a revolution in the offing.  Although Emanuel is trying to make scary talk.

We'll see.