The Conservative Conscience, Pt 2

Continuing on the the previous post.... I'm something of a contrarian. And I also have a heart for what I perceive to be the underdog. Four or five years from now, I may well be sitting with conservative friends, agreeing strongly about how the Democrats messed up the country with bad ideas and overreaching.

But that hasn't happened yet. What has happened was that I spent the past 6+ years writing columns and talking to friends about how excessive partisanship was a big problem and that we needed to find middle ground. The response of my conservative readers and friends was, "To hell with compromise, we've got a job to do."

So conservatives took firm command of the wheel, refused to share driving duties or to listen to navigational advice from others, drove drunkenly in the wrong direction for thousands of miles at a time, and crashed the car a few times for good measure.

When 75% of the public said, "We really would like to change drivers, thank you," that 25% minority got belligerent and said, "Look, we're on the right track, and those other guys will reeeeaaaally get you lost. We mean it. Those liberals are the worst drivers ever." And many conservatives are out-of-their-minds furious that the American public could dare to pull them from the wheel.

If the GOP said, "Holy cow, this didn't go well, I guess it's time for some rehab and for us to find some new conservative approaches that are appropriate for these new times," I'd have more respect for them. Instead, they're saying, "Give me that wheel back! How dare you?!?!"

I don't much respect that. The American people got more than enough opportunity to hear the Ayers accusations and the Rev. Wright issues, and still decided that it's time to give the other guys a chance to drive. If my conservative friends are convinced Obama will wreck the car even worse, they'll just have to let that play out. But in the meantime, I don't believe them when they insist that this road trip was going to turn out well if we just stayed the course.

When the Iraq war had just started, a group of friends debated the matter. I argued against the war, while most of the rest of the group passionately defended it. I complained about how President Bush had promised a "humbler" approach to foreign policy. One friend exclaimed: "Humility will come later. It's not the time for humility now."

That humility never seemed to come. It's still not here, even after 360 electoral votes against them. Conservatives have been court-ordered to rehab, but other than perhaps a few people like Gov. Bobby Jindal, they still insist that they don't have a problem, "only our rivals do." As they say in AA, you can't get better until you admit that you have a problem, and you can't admit you have a problem till you hit rock bottom. What's it going to take for conservatives to hit rock bottom....?