The Real Story - Jonah Goldberg - The Corner on National Review Online
The story is not that the GOP is self-destructing, it is that the conventional wisdom is being shown to be ludicrous. For some time now Frank Rich, Sam Tanenhaus and countless others (including David Frum) have been arguing that the GOP is a rump party and the only way for it to survive is for it to embrace me-too Republicanism of one flavor or another. The story of all three major races (VA, NJ, and NY-23) is that this conventional wisdom was incandescently wrong and ill-advised.
Not that we here at Daily Pundit haven’t been saying exactly that since 2006, all the while being excoriated at every step for trying to do something about it by hordes of crap-sandwich-gobbling GOP-bots who all would cheerfully have voted for Dede Scozzafava because she had an R after her name. Until this morning, that is.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Bill, did you read to the end of Goldberg’s post? It’s downright schizoid:
Whaaaa….? The GOP nominates a Democrat who ends up endorsing a Democrat when a Conservative blows her out of the race on a tide of anti-establishment populism and…it’s working?
I was in a bar with my girlfriend the other day, and I came back from a bathroom break to find some other guy making out with her. When I confronted them, he invited me outside and beat the shit out of me on the sidewalk. The last I saw of my girlfriend, she was laughing uproariously at me from that other dude’s limo as it pulled away from the curb.
Yeah…I’m a stud all right. It’s only a matter of time before she calls back and begs forgiveness. The make-up sex is going to be great.
I did read that, and at the time, I thought that Jonah had just sputtered into one of his occasional bouts of incoherence. In his heart, he leans hard toward conservatarianism. But his brain (and his and his wife’s paychecks) pull him toward GOP establishmentarian moderation. The result is sometimes amusing, if incomprehensible, to observe.
Bill,
I think he’s talking about the rank and file Republican voters that abandoned the RNC establishment choice and went with the conservative candidate. That’s who he’s calling “unapologetically conservative”.