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Cheer Up Conservatives. Life Is Grand!

my apologies for the blog outage I hope to be up and running later tonight.

I'm struggling at the moment with the knotty problem of importing a WordPress archive into Movable Type. 

Here's where I left off last.  Sunday I linked to Mark's post on "Conservatives" vs. Conservatism -- and now it looks like Mike also wrote Rush Limbaugh's Monday monologue.  I flagged this comment from Mark:

just as a poorly carried out experiment doesn't discredit science, so is conservatism not discredited by conservative-in-name-only politicians failing to live up to the traditional principles of their party.

And here's Rush:

Well, conservatism isn't dead because it cannot be dead.  Conservatism is not manmade.  Conservatism is a philosophy.  It's not a scheme.  It's not a plan to figure out what the American people need and want, and then give it to them.  That's populism!  Conservatism is a philosophy based on God-given natural rights.  The Declaration of Independence, is that dead?  Of course not!  What's dead is leadership on the Republican side, and because there is a lack of leadership of someone who the substantive understanding of liberty and the political skills to advance it, we get all this cockamamie nonsense about the death of our principles.  Our principles are not dead! Our principles cannot die.  I'll tell you, in a lot of ways this reminds me of Jimmy Carter and his malaise speech.  He blamed the American people for his miserable failures as president.  Now we have conservatives and conservative wannabes, many of whom have held high office or hold high office or speak and write from formerly conservative outposts, who blame conservatives for their own miserable failures.  What is lacking is not ideas and principles.  What's lacking is the right people to speak those ideas and principles, folks.  Admit it.

Read the whole thing.