P.J. O'Rouke: Conservatives, We Blew It

P.J. O'Rourke:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

I will admit that in the past couple of election cycles, Conservatism has really blown it. Conservatives have really been unable to demonstrate that their ideas on culture, the economy and foreign policy are right.

The conservative agenda got sacrificed on the alter of power (a common problem among politicians), and a desire to remain in power. We have abandoned the concept that government does not belong in every aspect of our daily life. We have sacrificed principles upon the alter of expediency.

It would be easy to sit and blame the economy for the GOP and conservative losses last week, but the simple fact is that we lost this election long before the economy went pear-shaped.

We blew it and we deserved to lose. Now, we have to take back the agenda and begin to simply dominate the domestic agenda, because there is no way Obama can do what he has promised and remain in office for a second term.