The Empire Will Strike Back

Conservative leaders plan a comeback

Just so you don't have to register with the LA Times to read the article, I'll just paste a few bits here:

Awaking to the dismal reality of widespread defeat, more than 100 of the conservative movement's most ardent leaders gathered as they have every Wednesday for more than a decade in a downtown conference room to discuss strategy... speaker after speaker declared that voters had not rejected conservative ideas but had merely rejected Republican Party leaders who strayed from the movement's basic values.

Translation: They got caught.

"There was no ideological rejection in this election," said Richard Lessner, former executive director of the American Conservative Union... "This was about the Republican Party not behaving like Republicans."

Translation: This was about republicans behaving exactly like republicans.

What is needed now [they] said, is reinforcement of their principles of cutting taxes and spending along with promotion of social causes such as the fights against abortion and same-sex marriage.

Cutting spending? What do republicans know about cutting spending?

The star guest was Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who reminded participants that after losing the White House to Clinton in 1992, the movement turned its losses into the 1994 takeover of Congress. "We have a long history as a movement... of using our difficult election outcomes to make ourselves better," Mehlman said. "...I think we need to look at it as a big opportunity as a party and a cause to return to our reformist approach and our reformist principles."

This guy was the head of the RNC, and he doesn't know that "conservatism" and "reform" are, by definition, opposites?

A Republican National Committee memo laying out talking points for conservative pundits, bloggers and other supporters... underscored that message, calling for the party to "refocus conservative principles of less government, lower taxes, less regulation, strong national defense, judicial restraint and fiscal conservatism."

Who do they think they're kidding? The size of government explodes under republican control, they spend money like mad, their idea of national defense is a Hitlerian fantasy, and their definition of "judicial restraint" is that corporate criminals, republican politicians, and their cronies are all above the law.

At the same time, the conservative leaders made clear where they thought the GOP had strayed from its principles.

Translation again: They got caught.

And their criticisms underscored some long-simmering tensions within the conservative movement that foreshadowed the GOP losses

...But not enough to make them do anything about it until, you guessed it, they got caught.

Several participants said the growth of government over the last 12 years — accelerated under the Bush presidency — had discouraged traditional supporters who had long viewed the GOP as the party of limited government.

Guess what? Goverment expanded more under Reagan and Bush than it did under Carter or Clinton. These so-called "fiscal conservatives" are delusional. Hypnotized. Fooling themselves, and sadly, fooling the poor saps who support them.

One election-night poll presented Wednesday illustrated that concern. It showed that more voters now considered the GOP the party of big government.

Finally. It's about @#$%^ time.

"There's no doubt in my mind it was not a repudiation of conservatives but it was a repudiation of the Republican Party," said the group's president.

Lately we've been bombarded with republicans' lamentations that their party stopped being "conservative" a long time ago. Too bad they didn't consider that a problem until, you guessed it, they got caught.

For his part, meeting host Grover Norquist said in an interview that he viewed the election as a bump on an otherwise smooth road to continued conservative dominance... Despite short-term setbacks, Norquist said, the conservative movement is "perfectly healthy. No one is losing because they favor tax cuts, are pro-life, pro-gun or pro-growth... And Democrats will be standing there, naked to the winds, having been forced by Nancy Pelosi to vote for tax increases, gun control and impeaching the president," he added, referring to the future speaker of the House.

That's the same Grover Norquist who supports Central American death squads as a tool for political change and likes to give money to Jack Abramoff.

Yup, they'll be back in new costumes. Let's be ready.