Old Wine in Pretty New Bottles is Still Vinegar

I'm home sick today, either from one of my 500 food allergies, or some bad food in Little Italy. Ugh. So that means after I begin to feel a bit better I'll be in bed on my laptop ALL day. I read a WAPO article an old friend e-mailed me about the withering (I superstitiously refuse to say it is dead-yet) of the Conservative Movement in America. While I didn't quite like the I-told-you-so tone of the article, I have to admit that there seems a change in the wind.

The writer, Greg Annis is doing a bit of crowing, and stating in a nutshell that America is finally waking up after thirty years to the fact that "...those ideas have all failed to deliver on the promises the conservatives made, and in many instances, the dogma has actually created new problems. Particularly after Hurricane Katrina, when Americans saw how hapless the Federal Emergency Management Agency was, the public has begun to realize that the right's hostility toward government has produced only ineffective government."

This is simply common sense. It stands to reason that people whose governing ideology is that government is such a terrible evil that it should be rendered powerless, and drowned in the bathtub, will not govern well, or at all when they are placed in charge of the government. They were advocating yet another variation of the anarchist movement. The writings of Gingrich, and Norquist and Buckley, and all those other conservative tools in think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation were variations on the Anarchist's Cookbook, minus overtly violent language.

Over at the Heritage site, they are claiming job losses aren't so very bad, and asking what Reagan would do about economic problems. They want guidance from a dead actor who had Alzheimer's most likely throughout his second term? This is what these great minds come up with after all that money thrown their way?

The messages of modern conservatism were in code. Racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic code. Blow it all up, tear it all down, build a Utopia just for you...or people like you. Riots, have never made sense-destroying out of rage? (if you're that angry go take on your oppressors, don't steal a TV) Anarchy in most of it's many, many forms, has never really made sense either. How exactly do you know that destroying everything will make what comes after better? Propaganda of the Deed? Using violence against your political enemies really advances society-ask any Iraqi.

The problems now biting the GOP in the ass were a long time coming in part due to an uninformed electorate, one not taught civics, and ethics, and that being a citizen requires one take some responsibility for how one's society functions. The other component is they appealed to people's Dark Sides, the selfish, bigoted, brutish parts of human nature. Perhaps American society is evolving, perhaps it has simply suffered so much it now sees the emperor has no clothes. Now, in response, some young conservative authors are floating the idea of (gasp!) change! They want a pretty new bottle for their vinegary swill.

Evolution, (which they don't believe in) is just a fancy word for change. All life changes, it is the only constant in life...a being that does not evolve goes extinct.