Term limits. What's a good conservative to do?

Captain Ed touches on a topic that I've struggled with for years now: Term limits. Whether it be term limits for Congress, term limits for the President, or even term limits for local office, I find myself terribly torn on this issue. I may tell you today that I am con, but next week sometime I may be pro.

On the one hand, I don't believe government should be protecting us from ourselves, and that is essentially what term limits are trying to do. The logic behind term limits is that incumbents, whether it be because of their entrenched power, their high profile ability to raise funds, or gerrymandering, are incredibly difficult to defeat. But so what? It doesn't matter that an incumbent has built in advantages. As long as that man or woman wants to continue to run, and A majority of people want to vote for him/her, the people should be allowed to do so. Think of it this way. A lot of us are peeved because of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform. That bill essentially said, well, the people are too easily fooled, so we the government must step in and fix this so people can't fool them. Term limits do the same thing. Additionally, they create lame duck terms of office, where the politician is pretty unaccountable but also less powerful. After all, they have no fear of an upcoming election.

On the flip side, office holders who are firmly entrenched in their position do tend to bypass the convictions and ideas which got them elected in the first place. Instead, their life becomes a game of attaining plush committee appointments. Once a politician attains some status in office, primary challenges from their own party become nearly impossible, and most people won't break ranks to elect a member of the opposite party. To some extent, the otherwise irritating Joe Scarborough makes this point nicely in his recent book. He shows how the Repbulican Revolution and the Contract with America slowly started to unwind as that class of Republican Congressmen began to play the game they had rallied against. It would seem that the key to keeping ideals first and power politics buried is to routinely pump fresh blood through.

So I'm curious, can anyone out their give me a definitive Conservative opinion on term limits on way or the other? Right now I am solidly con-term limits, but as I said above, this winter I was solidly pro-term limits. I feel like I'm John F. Kerry.