"There is this unspoken assumption among a lot of Republicans that maybe a defeat in November might not be such a bad thing and the right thing to do is go down with the ship and then we can return to the true Reagan principles and the party will be stronger for it. Well, if we lose in November, when this ship goes down, it's going to be a big vortex in the sea. We face the possibility of having a strong Democratic president, an increased majority for the Democrats in both houses of Congress. The way will be open for a new burst of governmental activism, which we have not seen before. Bill Clinton tried it in 1993, and he failed. Jimmy Carter's plans blew up on the launch pad.

The last time we've seen a successfully burst of Democratic activism was 1964-65. We are in real danger of seeing a similar thing again, and it will be pretty negative for the future of the country. That's one possibility. Another is, when you lose in this way, you can often lose for a very long time. Parties that lose often react not by adapting but by retreating to their core principles and becoming even more of a minority party than ever. We can all see how that happened with the Democrats. After the defeat of 1980, how do they respond? They revert to their old New Deal roots in 1984 and offer Walter Mondale saying "Everything that Roosevelt and Truman didn't do, I'll do." They got beat worse in 1984 than they got beat in 1980. Then they got beat in 1988. Even in 1992, they were only back up to 42 percent of the vote.

If you get on to a bad path in politics, you can be out for a long time. When is the Republican congressional majority going to return? It's not something where you say, "Well, we'll lose and then we'll recover." It's hard to recover in American politics."

As Dr. Helen recently observed, Frum has his own large number of issues with basic conservative principles. In fact, one might say that Frum is a perfect example of the very reason why the Republicans have set themselves up for what looks to be total disaster this year in the elections. The very reason the Republicans are standing to lose so badly in these elections is because they have not only not stuck to their principles, they have more or less advocated the positions that are generally synonymous with the Democrats, while adding several unpopular issues on top of them from Iraq to illegal immigration.

Consider how the elections would have looked in 2006, and 2008, had the Republicans run a tight operation in Congress and the Bush Administration. Let's say that they got at least a chunk of the conservative goals accomplished. They,

• Balanced the budget almost every year from 2001 to the present.
• Performed at least one good round of sensible economic deregulation.
• Had systematically deported and ended visa programs for most of the citizens of hostile Islamic states living in the United States, instead of giving us the USA PATRIOT Act, TSA and other politically correct abominations.
• Had abolished the NEA and reduced the Department of Education into a clearing house for a federal voucher program (or better yet, abolished the Dept. of Education).
• Had secured the southern border with 10,000 additional border patrol agents
• Had informed private businesses that they had six months to get in compliance with immigration law by firing all illegal immigrants, or the Department of Justice would rain unholy fury on willful violators in the courts.
• Had conducted a series of major reforms on existing federal agencies instead of giving us the beast we call the Department of Homeland Security.

I could go on here, but it's obvious where the problems are with the Republican Party. They ran a piss poor operation for the last seven years or more that had systematically failed to accomplish the goals of the Republican base. In fact, they have now come so full circle, that they have become the very sort of politicians that in 1994 they were elected to sweep out of power.

The Republicans stand very little chance of actually winning. If it's Hillary versus McCain it will come down to a a matter of whether the number of people who are willing to vote for anyone to see her not get elected is at least equal in size to the number of people who want to see her win. If Obama ends up winning the nomination, all bets are off for a Republican victory. He'll go through the electoral college like Sherman through Atlanta as far as the Republicans are concerned.

Seeing as how the Republicans have fundamentally betrayed them, 2008 would be an excellent year for conservatives to start moving out of the Republican Party for the Constitution Party. If the majority of real conservatives left, it would leave the Republican Party incapable of ever standing up to the Democrats. While that may seem like an even worse situation, the more irrelevant the Republican Party becomes, the more pressure there will be in the Democratic Party from the lack of a common enemy that used to bind together the various factions who would otherwise fight one another. Actively seeking the destruction of the Republican Party as an institution might be the only way for real conservatives to ever make any progress.