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I’m getting an odd sense of satisfaction listening to a bit of Rush Limbaugh leading up to what appears to be the conservative Waterloo. He’s going batshit on his own party.

Now, I wish to ask all of you influential pseudointellectual conservative media types who have also abandoned McCain and want to go vote for Obama (and you know who you are without my having to mention your name) what happened to your precious theory?  What the hell happened to your theory that only John McCain could enlarge this party, that we had to get moderates and independents?  How the hell is it that moderate Republicans are fleeing their own party and we are not attracting other moderates and independents? How in the hell did you people figure this to happen?  So the Republican Party’s own strategy here not only has it backfired, it’s embarrassing.  I don’t have any brief for William Weld, don’t misunderstand, but he’s a moderate Republican.  

“The Republican Party, we gotta be a big tent,” and that’s code words for, “We gotta have some pro-choicers in our party to get rid of the influence of these hayseed hicks in the South who are pro-life.”  Well, they have gone, and I, for one, say, “Damn well good riddance!”  Weld, why don’t you stay a Democrat?  McClellan, stay a Democrat.  All you intellectual conservative media types, go ahead and stay a Democrat once you move over.  By the way, we know what this is about.  This is about being invited to state dinners in a Barack Obama administration.

Listening to Rush on November 5 is going to be a joy.

It seems to me that John McCain had two choices with his VP. He could either reach out to the center and try to pull in independents or he could play to the base of the hard core conservatives. In choosing Palin, he obviously felt the base was far more important than the center.

At the same time, they suggested, Ms. Palin would also be given the task of appealing to evangelical voters, who have long been unenthusiastic about Mr. McCain. In many ways, the choice of Ms. Palin may prove to have been as much an effort to drive up turnout among the Republican base as it was a move to compete for women.

“We had a solid Republican and evangelical base,” said Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain. “But now it’s going to be very intense.” James C. Dobson, the influential conservative Christian leader who said in the primaries that he could never vote for Mr. McCain, said the selection of Ms. Palin had won him over.

If 65 days before an election, McCain is still worried about conservatives voting for him, he got real troubles.

The New Yorker’s George Packer writes a brilliant piece this week chronicling the downfall of the conservative movement. He talks to all of the major conservative players and his analysis is both cogent and fair. It’s a long piece, but well worth the read. Here are a few key passages.

The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces. “The fact that there was no conventional, establishment, old-style conservative candidate was not an accident,” Brooks said. “Mitt Romney pretended to be one for a while, but he wasn’t. Rudy Giuliani sort of pretended, but he wasn’t. McCain is certainly not. It’s not only a lack of political talent—there’s just no driving force, and it will soften up normal Republicans for change.”

*   *   *

Yuval Levin, a former Bush White House official, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with Gingrich’s diagnosis. “There’s an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn’t yet been made clear by defeat at the polls,” he said. “The conservative idea factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but nobody agrees what to do about it.”

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

*   *   *

Instead of just limiting government, the Gingrich revolutionaries set out to disable it. Although the legislative reins were in their hands, these Republicans could find no governmental projects to organize their energy around. David Brooks said, “The only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to government.” When the Times Magazine asked William Kristol what ideas he was for—in early 1995, high noon of the Gingrich Revolution—Kristol could think to mention only school choice and “shaping the culture.”

One of the clear lessons of the dialogue on this blog is that the conservatives really don’t have anything they are “for”, except the War in Iraq. Until they begin helping the progressives in this huge reform process ahead of us, they will have nothing to offer the American people.