More on "Republican traitors"

The always worth reading Ross Douthat weighs in on "The Liberal Media's Conservatives":

an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point

Please read the whole post...as usual, my admiration for Douthat knows few bounds...

But look at the follow-up with reader responses, notably:

[Palin] is the only bright, joyful thing to happen to the Republican Party this year.

Joyful?!? Bright?!? Someone needs to hit this freakish reader with a clue-bat, not say "Points taken".

I disagree with some of the analysis that follows, but it's a reasoned take and Douthat is welcome to his opinion. Happily, he ends with a very strong conclusion:

the counternarrative being pushed by the critics of the critics - namely, that the GOP ticket is losing mainly because the media is biased, Obama's playing dirty, McCain isn't a true conservative and his campaign won't go after the Ayers connection hard enough - is vastly more damaging to conservatism's long-term prospects, I think, than anything that Brooks or Parker or Buckley or anyone else had said and done.

Take this passage from Steyn's post, for instance:

But, if the combination of gazillions of dollars in illegal foreign donations, Acorn's Dig-Up-The-Vote operation, a doting media that would embarrass Kim Jong-Il and the Republican nominee's inability even to speak up on issues where he was right all along (like Fannie Mae), if all that is now unstoppable, I will be proud to have lost with Sarah Palin, who (unlike Brooks and Buckley) runs a state bigger than most European Union nations, has fought an honorable campaign, and has been responsible for such energy and enthusiasm as the ticket can muster.

This is what a lot of conservatives are going to be telling themselves after election day: That Obama cheated, that the media cheated, that McCain wasn't a conservative anyway, and that the only reason Sarah Palin wasn't a hit with swing voters is that the press - with an assist from conservative quislings like Frum and Brooks and Parker and Noonan - poisoned the well. And in such thinking lies the seeds of years or even decades of defeat.

Decades. I venture 16-24 years, baring dramatic unforseeable events.