I haven't heard of anyone that thinks that Pat Buchanan has any credibility left. Talk about washed up.

"George W. Bush is the most conservative president we've ever had"

Really? That must depend on what your definition of "conservative" is. Perhaps he really is, as you said, "remaking conservatism." That is, he's re-defining conservatism to something that spends MORE money than Democrats ever dreamt of, creates a HUGE new entitlement program (Medicare drugs), signs grossly invasive and unconstitutional campaign finance reform, jacks the free market with the steel tariffs, and the list goes on.

What is the definition of "conservatism" under which Bush would qualify, exactly?

As a Libertarian candidate for US Senate, it would not hurt my feelings to see W get beat. I have to give him some credit for aggressively defending the country militarily, but he's completely screwing up nearly every other possible way.

Even a jackass like Kerry would be hard pressed to do worse. If nothing else, simply the political opposition of a Congress controlled by the other party would slow him down from the kind of spending sprees Bush has indulged in.

"tax cuts for the anti-government conservatives"

Cutting taxes does not reduce the size of government, only cutting spending does.

Mr. Barger:

You're lost in the trees but don't know you're in a forest:

* Drugs: seniors were going to get drug coverage, that's how democracy works. The President got HSAs as part of the package--they matter more than the money for drugs.

* Steel tariffs pale by comparison to the free trade agreements the administration has already negotiated or is negotiating. No other president has brought an agreement from proposal to signature before.

But you're right about CFR.

Robert:

Cutting spending doesn't either.

The problem is that while the libertarians and anti-government conservatives can enunciate worthy goals, they have no idea how to lead us down a path in the real world in which we achieve those goals.

If you want to change the momentum of an object, you first have to stop accelerating it and then start decelerating it. To someone who is only looking at the position, it appears you are still headed in the wrong direction, and you are. You will be for as long as it takes to cancel out the previous built up velocity. Simple logic should say that what took a half-century or more to achieve is not going to be reversed by a single election. So they make the mistake of giving up even though they are in a position to continue that deceleration and eventually (after a lot of hard work) come close to their goal.

The libertarians and anti-government conservatives have lost, for the foreseeable future, on the question of whether there will be things like Social Security. The answer is "yes" and to keep revisiting it as if it's still an open question is an exercise in frustration and failure. But these are people who seem to love losing because they believe losing somehow validates their position as being the noble, morally correct one.

What's still an open question, however, is how will such programs be funded and maintained, and who gets to control them. As with the HSAs, that's still an open question, and one where victory for the Left-most position is not assured. Since the libertarians and anti-government conservatives would rather lose everything than compromise their sacred principles, that are absent in that debate, by choice. The least they could do is then not provide aid and comfort to the Left by demanding ideological rigidity of the non-Left who do choose to get involved in those fights.

The Democrats are heading for a crack up and the Republicans are aching for a purge of the disloyal and RINOs.

My bet is the Democrats crash before the election and the Republicans after. Do you really expect the Party of Santorum and Sullivan to hold together?

No matter what happens to the Democrats Bush is giong to have a hard time getting his agenda passed. This is Bush's second term. No loyalty will be enforceable post 2 Nov 04.

Raoul, the Bush administration has actually accelerated us in the wrong direction. It is obvious that neither party will be given a mandate to decelerate the budget mess. The momentum will come to a devastating stop when we crash into the wall of unpayable obligations. There is no stopping it now.

I will vote for Bush for national security reasons, I am no purist. But lets not fool ourselves that our budget deficit is manageable.

>But these are people who seem to love losing
>because they believe losing somehow validates
>their position as being the noble, morally
>correct one.

Isn't that why Mike Medved calls them "Losertarians"?

Robert:

By the end of WWII our debt was 150% of GDP and we were the most powerful nation in human history. Today it's 70% and we still are. Debt just doesn't mean much.

Al, what happens if the pubbies decide that Kerry's got a mandate and don't stop the spending?

It's not like they were thrifty the past 3 years.

I've been hearing talk of the coming crash for a quarter century now. How the deficit was beyond control, how the national debt could never be retired, how the the Arabs and Japanese were going to buy up the country and foreclose, and on and on. And how by now we'd all be living in an over-polluted, overpopulate hellhole, in a new Ice Age featuring rising seas due to melting ice caps, and all the other predictions of environmental catastrophe. And let's not forget that the Soviet Union was going to be with us forever. The same goes for how one or both of the two major parties was going to disappear and be replaced by the Libertarians or Greens or Reformed Whigs.

At some point I came to the conclusion these people making these predictions have no idea what they are talking about, and are only interested in selling such talk because the alternate was that they'd have to get a real job, and they have no salable skills. I've also realized that there is a common thread in all these predictions-- that people are stupid and are incapable of changing their behavior, ever, even if things have gone to hell.

Cynical perhaps, but can anyone offer a better explanation? My conclusion is that all those predictions failed because their assumption is wrong-- people will change if there is enough reason to do so. The key is to give a reason, or force the contradictions. Even disruptions, like the War Between The States, happen because of systemic problems that were obvious from the beginning, or the Great Depression, because Hoover and then Roosevelt were unable to trust the system to correct itself.

As for the future of the parties--

The Democrats are not going to disappear by '006 or '008 if Kerry loses. In '006 we might see another batch of the dinosaurs retiring, as being in the minority is no fun when you used to be able to run things, and have no hope of ever getting that power back. But they will be replaced by Democrats who will never have known power, and more open to the idea that negotiation and accommodation is a better way to go than hysterical confrontation. (Seems like Mr. Obama might be a leader in that regard.) They are going to transform themselves into the GOP of the 1950s through 1970s-- a minority party satisfied with their 40%.

Neither are the Republicans going to fracture-- Jeffords (and Smith of New Hampshire before him) showed what happens if you try and you fail. Sure Spector and McCain are going to be their hemorrhoidal selves, but they like their committee chairmanships, too. And they'll have a President of their own party to act as moderator. (I'm curious to see how Bush will handle the succession in light of Cheney not wanting the role of Crown Prince. Having it wide open may be good, as except for FDR, in the last century we've never had a President successfully install a successor to carry on his programs, and his solution was to do it himself.)

The deficit is not an issue like it was ten years ago because it's perceived as being managed/is manageable. If that changes, we will see a party (probably the one out of power) making an issue of it again. And once it's back under control, people will again stop caring. That's seems to be the way things work.

Remember term limits? The hold incumbents have over congress is even tighter now than it was then, yet it's not an issue. I would guess that's because when it was an issue, we hadn't seen a change in control of the House in decades, and the few years of the GOP Senate in the '80s seemed an aberration. Conservatives and Republicans were the ones really pushing it, as it was assumed they had no chance at the ballot box. It stopped being an issue the same time as the GOP and Gingrich took over. Funny how that works. Give the GOP another ten years of control, and I would bet it will become an issue again, this time among Dems tired of minority status and their own "get along, go along" members of congress.

Raoul:

I can't see the Democrats being "get along, go along" types. The ones who are leaving are the moderates, not the hard-lefties. And the courts killed term limits; had they supported them, the voters would have rallied behind them, I suspect.

You are right about the doom-sayers. It has been going on since the mid-60s at least. All I will say is that when a real crash or crisis comes, everyone will be surprised. And there will be lots of denial.

Raoul,
If you remember the story of the boy that cried "wolf", the wolf finally did arrive.

Of course people will change when forced to, but the cost will be much higher than if they changed proactively, when the problems became apparent to the ordinary observer. Everyone knows that Social Security will run out of money at some point in the next 20 to 30 years. It may be sooner. People knew this 15 years ago. But as Jim pointed out, denial is a powerful force.

I don't fear the future economic dislocations as much as I fear the political and social dislocations that will result when the truth sets in.

Robert:

No, he doesn't. It's a fairy tale.

So is the Social Security trust fund.

Yes, and?