Witness this:

“By definition, conservatism prefers the past to the present – in William F. Buckley’s famous formulation, history was something to be stood athwart and sternly told to stop – but over the past half year, the present has been particularly trying for American conservatives.

Politically, they’re in the wilderness, with Barack Obama’s popularity stubbornly high, and wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. But there’s also a deeper sense of crisis: a worry within the movement that the Republican Party has lost its identity as the party of ideas.”

Loaded ignorance about what we believe, and even more about Barack Obama’s popularity. By the way, it’s shrinking rapidly Drake. Again by the way, we’ve only lost in the last 2 elections, we won the last three before that, and 5 of the last eight presidential races.

To use a football analogy we’re behind in the third quarter, hardly out of the game.

Wee are not “stuck in the past”, liberalism is. We believe in the freedom of people to make their own choices free of Government interference. Liberals don’t. Liberals still live in the 60s, looking for all those things they dwelt on then, not noticing that the world has moved on. They still think of racism in 60s terms of black and white, we’ve moved on. Far more blacks have served under conservative presidents over the last 40 years than liberal ones, and let’s not forget it was Democrats that resisted the chance of civil rights in the first place.

I digress hugely.

Drake goes on to list what he calls “The Next Conservative Thinkers”. Robert McCain – as do I – has a question about one of the selections:

” A rather strange article, I say, because one of the “young thinkers” named is Reiham Salam of the New America Foundation (NAF). If that causes some conservatives to scratch their heads, take a gander at the NAF board of directors. To say that the most recognizably “conservative” name on the list is Francis Fukuyama would be to say everything that need be said, were it not for the presence on the NAF board of Berrnard L. Schwartz.

Ring a bell? Yep, the same Bernard L. Schwartz who gave more than $1 million to Bill Clinton and Democrats, and whose Loral Space & Communications was fined $20 million for providing sensitive missile technology to Beijing.

Obviously, Schwartz is just the fellow to sponsor the development of “intriguing new intellectual frameworks for conservative principles.” Another of the “young thinkers” named by the Globe is Megan McArdle, who supported Barack Obama in the last election. Such are the fonts of “the next big conservative ideas,” you see. “

The others share similar disqualifying factors, except for Megan McArdle whom he says:

“McArdle, whose politics make her more a libertarian than a classic conservative, is one of the most prominent voices in the political blogosphere. Also an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, she came to both journalism and blogging somewhat sideways, after working at a series of failed Internet start-ups and going to business school.”

I like McArdle, but her views most of the time are hardly conservative in the truest sense of the word. In fact she is more a center-left libertarian blogger. But nice try Drake.

So we can chalk this up to another attempt by the left to “help us” redefine ourselves, but again by the time we get to 2010 it will be liberals who will be wondering what went wrong.

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