Conservatives Ho! Backward Into the Future

AH! THE GOOD OLD DAYS

It was a helluva week for the down-on-its-knees conservative movement.

As Ed Morrissey writes at Captain’s Quarters:

"Winston Churchill once remarked that God takes care of drunks and the United States of America and so it seems to be as we approach the end of a remarkable week in which milestones of success for the conservative movement have come one after another.

"I must confess I didn't expect a week such as this. Between Bush's various expansions of Big Government, the GOP congressional majority throwing away of its position and the desperately blind opposition of the Washington Establishment to earmark and other common sense reforms, I was mulling a post asking if the time had come to declare the conservative enterprise a failure.

"We have just been blessed with three signal victories."

Those would be the Supreme Court decisions turning back a half century of progress in school desegregation and limiting political speech, the death of the immigration reform bill and a crushing blow to the Fairness Doctrine movement.

Coming from the other side of the political equation was Robert Stein, who writes at Connecting.the.Dots:

"It was never just about abortion. The struggle for America’s soul goes deeper, as the Supreme Court and Congress have been showing us this week.

"It was never as simple as faith vs. reason. Rational people can recognize a Higher Power, the religious can respect science and logic.

"What it has been about is the conflict between our hopes and fears, between the risks of freedom and the comfort of control, between our needs to feel decent and to feel safe."

As the Aussies say, that’s it in a bit.

For even a thoughtful and savvy conservative like the Captain who I daresay is not anywhere near as paranoid about the future as many fellow conservatives, "progress" is often represented by turning back the clock to seemingly safer and more predictable times.

For a thoughtful and savvy moderate-liberal like Robert, it is acknowledging the past but having the determination to march boldly ahead.