So far, we have three pages of failed ideas that have pretty much been roundly repudiated. Not one of them, so far, thinks they could just have been wrong. No, we've just focused on the wrong things, we didn't work with our base, we weren't conservative enough.

I'm still currently registered Republican (as I have been since I was old enough to do so), though that's only as long as my switch to "independent" takes to process. There's no question that I feel the party left me behind, rather than the other way around. I'll admit that I have loosened up with age, but I viewed the party as one of fiscal and personal responsibility, reasonable excercise of strength in foreign policy, advancing science and technology, and a focus on individualism and liberty. The party before me today in no way resembles that ideal. It is strangled by the religious right (who would repudiate me for being nonreligious, anyway -- I'm not even a citizen, by their standards) with an irrational focus on abortion (which even the Southern Baptist Convention supported the right to, some decades ago) and homophobia (there IS NO SLIPPERY SLOPE, and it's no one else's business, anyway), is fiscally irresponsible on an enormous scale, idiotic in terms of foreign relations, anti-science to a degree that would be comical were it not frightening, and working to curtail every civil liberty they can get their hands on (excepting the right to own a weapon).

As a party, the Republicans have forgotten that they are supposed to govern for the nation, and not themselves. Perhaps they will look around and realize that the country has not left them behind; rather, they were working to re-create a caricature of a nation that never did exist, and the rest of us realized it and left them to stew.

Yes, as long as the Republican Party lets the social conservatives use abortion as the touchstone of political correctness, they are looking at declining enrollment. They have the right to commit political suicide, and plenty of detractors wish they would, but they are demonstrating their ignorance of success if they think they're going to turn the country around preaching to the choir.

It is sad that conservatives can't understand that their inability to "tell their story" and "stay on topic" relates to the abject failure of their ideas. Then, to rub their noses in their shame, the "fix" for the banks' problems, after some twenty years of increasingly contentious deregulation, was a publicly-funded bailout. One wonders if the plan to finance that bailout is the same as the plan to finance the war in Iraq: pass it on to our children's childeren's children.

And THEIR childeren's childeren.