And the scales fell from their eyes

Peggy Noonan has a decent piece up at OpinionJournal today in which she wonders whether some Republicans want to lose this year. It is hardly a new thought, seeing that it has been debated amongst conservative bloggers for months. I do have one serious quible with it, though, and that is this statement:

But there's unease in the base too, again for many reasons. One is that it's clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of "conservative."

He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining. He didn't go to the people whose loyalty and support raised him high and say, "This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm changing things, here's my thinking, here are the implications." The cynics around him likely thought this a good thing. To explain is to make things clearer, or at least to try, and they probably didn't want it clear. They had the best of both worlds, a conservative reputation and a liberal reality.

That is flat out incorrect. Has she forgotten about compassionate conservatism? Has she forgotten that this is, after all, the son of a man whom conservatives came to despise during his own presidency. No, playing the ignorance card is not acceptable here. We all knew as far back as 2000 that we were not getting a perfect conservative in George W. Bush. If we try now to say we didn't know, we're only being dishonest with ourselves. We knew we were getting a guy with deep conservatism on some issues, but who by and large was not that conservative.

If there has been any failure, it is that we conservatives have not acted to cultivate truly conservative candidates, elect them, and then pushed them to higher offices. We had a grouping in 1994. Some of them we didn't hold accountable enough and they went native. With others, we went along with the self defeating ideals of term limits, and watched them voluntarily leave office, true to their ideals. There are only a few left. And now, angry at how things have turned out, some conservatives are going to pick up their toys and go home by sitting out this election. We conservatives certainly do need to do some soul searching, but that soul searching should not start with the soul of conservatism but with our own individual conservative souls. We each own a piece of where things are at. Our only choice now is to roll up our sleaves and start fixing things. I'm of the opinion that it is easier to fix something while it is still operable. My fear is that a lot of conservatives have already decided that the only way to fix things is to completely dismantle the conservative movement and rebuild it again from scratch.