Oh, you mean the guy that betrayed his conservative constituents and his fighting men at almost every turn, spent eight years dodging turd balls from the Left when he was their greatest benefactor and never said sh*t even when he caught a mouthful of it? Yeah, I remember that guy. That was the guy who set us up for Obama.

Point taken, but a lot of us were done with W when he refused to stand up to the Left. Ever. He set us up the bomb!

His daddy is a one-worlder and I still think the "Family" had little W by the short hairs.

President B ush the younger wouldn't have won reelection had we not been at war, and barely beat Al freakin' Gore. That's not exactly an argument for moderates being successful, especially given how poorly they've done the other times. One exception does not negate a rule.

GWB may have been Republican, but he sure was no conservative. That whole "compassionate conservatism" schtick should have given the game away, but millions fell for it.

As I wrote in 2003, compassion cannot be a basis for public policy.

I agree about compassion, but the point is that he won. Twice. And stopped both Gore and Kerry. From the center. Not from some Conservative Redoubt.

"barely beat Al freakin' Gore. That's not exactly an argument for moderates being successful"

Au contraire. A win is a win since the election is winner take all.

Anger, anger, anger.. It gets in the way of effective action.

I do agree that W, never promised to be an immigration hawl or budget enforcer, on the other hand, the elites contempt of him was quite self evident,

If Bush won from the center, then are you saying you want a repeat of a Bush presidency to avoid another 4 years of Obama? Bush handed us over to Obama and has remained curiously silent throughout.

If W holds his precious commitment to never criticize a sitting President as more important than the current crisis, then I guess we're all just overreacting to Obama and his plans for our destruction.

The times have changed, Gerard. Obama is neither Kerry nor Gore; he's much, much worse. Different measures may be called for. Some Republicans appear to believe that the 2008 election was just like any other American election. I disagree. I believe it was less an election than a coup.

The first thing Obama did was rob the bank and give it to his political cronies. It's been downhill ever since. I don't think the Left has any intention of relinquishing the White House now that they've got it, regardless of how moderate the Republican candidate is, or even what the vote is. I believe I've voted in my last relatively free election. I believe it's so bad that extreme measures may be called for---like nominating someone who's as Conservative as we can find. Moderation isn't working against this crowd this time. It's dire.

In fact, I commented on another thread yesterday with a couple of links to Sultan Knish's post, So You Want a Revolution? It may have gotten caught in your spam filter. He wrote something that made a hell of a lot of sense to me:

"Politics is based around a consensus. The left does not operate on a consensus, it is a revolutionary movement and it works by subverting the consensus and presenting its revolutionary position as the new consensus. All that is left for the politicians then is to affirm the new consensus. This has happened over and over again in the lifetimes of even the youngest person reading this article and the process has been accelerating lately because it is a revolutionary process.

There are two types of conservative politicians. Gatekeepers and revolutionaries. The gatekeepers are consensus builders, they talk a great deal about traditional values, and are elected to keep change out. This defensive strategy is a dead end because the real changes are happening outside the direct purview of the gatekeepers, who usually lack the imagination and courage to do anything about them. When the left pushes hard enough, the gatekeepers fold and add the new order of things into their panoply of American values."

This is really a dog fight, and I suspect we can no longer afford to play it safe. This process is far from over, which is good.

Great comment, ahem.

I voted for W both times, and I don't regret it, given the alternatives of Gore and Kerry. But I'm much more critical of him in hindsight than I was when he was president. He never vetoed a single spending bill while the Republicans controlled Congress. Their profligate spending and the lack of adult supervision from the White House helped set the stage for the electoral reverses of 2006 and 2008.

He promoted Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind, two disastrous bills that increased the deficit and entrenched Federal control over education. He nominated the execrable Hank Paulson as Treasury Secretary, who basically held a gun to Congress' heads and threatened "tanks in the streets" unless they passed TARP. That taxpayer bailout set the table for Obama to take it to the next level.

I really don't want to go too deeply into his foreign policy right now, as that would make this comment about ten times longer and it's late and I need to go to bed soon. Maybe tomorrow. But didn't he call Islam "the religion of peace" after 9/11? Don't Iraq and Afghanistan have sharia law enshrined in their constitutions? That's quite a contrast to the new governments we imposed on Germany and Japan in 1945.

Bottom line: No, I don't want to see another "centrist Republican" candidate.

Not really related to the topic at hand, but I saw this comment by “Buck O’Fama” at Belmont Club:

My analogy is imagine the Democrats propose jumping off a 20-story building. Anybody with half a brain knows that is a stupid idea. Instead of saying so, the traditional GOP response was to propose jumping off a 10-story building as a compromise and claim that was some kind of victory.

That pretty well encapsulates my frustration and anger with the Republican Party.

4.9 trillion of centrist G.W. Bush debt...

Au contraire. A win is a win since the election is winner take all.

While true, that wasn't my point. My point is that he barely managed a win while being centrist while people previous to him failed utterly and the ones who ran as conservatives won gargantuan landslides.

Which seems the more successful and useful approach?