As a trivial example, we continue to throw money at education, only to find out that our students rate very low, our education bureauocracy is massively bloated, and we spend far too much per student, to no avail whatsoever. Time for a change.

The Republican Party seems to have been infiltrated with leftwingers, and their idiologies, to the point that one has a hard time sorting out the truly conservative Republicans today. One sees lots of RINOs, and near RINOs, or turning RINOs. Witness Trent Lott's, and others, vote YEA on cloture for the Dream bill. It seems very difficult for our Congressmen to stand on principle (Conservative principle!) as opposed to really dirty compromises with the unprincipalled Devils on the other side of the aisle. The immigration votes are a full case in point too: it should not have been close to begin with!

How is it that Reid can maneuver bills against the rules of the Senate? He must have tacit or open support from some of the Republicans to use these tactics.

Huh? Seems to me that that is the Republican strategy. Starting with Ronald Reagan, who claimed that we could massively increase defense spending, cut taxes, and balance the budget.

Continuing with George Bush, who also sold the supply side snake oil.

Pay less, get the same or more. That is the Republican mantra.

Meanwhile of course, Reagan and Bush have between them added 8 trillion dollars to our children's inherited debt. But thats there problem,,,apparently.

So why is the political rhetoric in our country so poisonous?

Henry Kissinger once remarked that, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." The same may be true in American politics generally. Internecine debates can be quite savage.

American politics is, as columnist George Will described it long ago, akin to a football game played entirely between the 40 yard lines. The amount of ideological variation within the mainstream is narrow, indeed, by the standards of Western democracies. Indeed, by European standards, we’ll almost certainly elect a conservative in 2008.

Too true. So why is the political rhetoric in our country so poisonous? Perhaps this is a characteristic of democracy itself?

And I see this as being driven by the conservatives in this country. Bush scores higher than Congress because he is more conservative, but in whole, the population is not satisfied and is looking for a change.

That sounds to me like a conservative movement that is growing in strength.

If the people who call themselves and are called conservatives are judged by their actions and the policies they promote, then the common denominator is an egocentric approach to politics. The fundamental belief is in "small government" , meaning a government that serves them and noone else. To social conservatives that means a governnment that hates the people they hate and panders to their fear that other people might make choices of which they disapprove. They want to use the governnment to impose their sense of order on the world so that they can feel more secure. To hawkish conservatives the purpose of government is to make them feel more powerful and less fearful by winning military victories. Who, what, and where we fight is not as important as the thrill of feeling victorious. Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran! Fear the Enemy! Smite the Enemy! If there isn't an outside enemy to fear, then this sort of conservative has to dream up an inside one, hence the Red Scare and similar phenomena. To nondoctrinaire ordinary conservatives the purpose of government is to fund those programs which help them, defund programs of interest to others, and cut their taxes so someone else can pay for the programs which support the conservative. This is the red state phenomenon where recepients of all kinds of special interest money--loggers, ranchers, farmers,-- bitch about taxes, brag about how indepedent they are while living (for three generations now) on governnment subsidies. This is also thhe so-called fiscal conservative mindset and the thought pattern of the moderate Republican. Their philosophy is that it is important to spend tax money on what serves them, not important to spend on anything else,and that thhe money for their needs should come out of someone else's pocket. And then you have the conservative politician who really believes in nothing except the acquisistion of power for himself or herslf, sucks up to special intersts for campaign funds, and panders to the fears, hates, and self-deceptions of the base to get votes.

Take, as evidence, the conservative reaction to global warming. It's a selfish, cowardly reation: first denial that there is a problem, then grudging admission that there might be a problem but denial of the size of the problem and denial of the need to do anything about the problem. Only when individual conservatives (farmers first, probably) feel the effects, will individual conservatives decide that the governnment has a responisbility to help, and then they will only support help for themselves.

What it amounts to is that conservatism isn't a philosophy, just a tendency on the part of a porportion of the population to view government power as an extention of their ( and only their)own needs, fears, and hates. It's selfishness.

That's why, in the last hundred years of American history conservatives have exactly noting they can point to as a positive conservative accomplishment of governnmet. It's also why, despite their role as self-serving obstructionists, that conservatism is always with us. Selfishness is part of human nature and will always manifest iiself in politics.

His Wilsonian foreign policy and LBJ-insipred spending sprees make him one of the more big government presidents we have had.

The paleocons, those in the stamp of William F. Buckley, are old. They're not as active a force in the country as they used to be and, consequently, mostly irrelevant to the conservative movment as such. That leaves the social conservatives and the libertarians and, honestly, they don't play nicely together.

But there's another issue, too: right libertarians tend to be mistrustful of government. That usually doesn't give one the inclination and, frankly, the patience to run for public office, especially higher public office. That leaves the social conservatives seeking office which has tended to blunt the liberatarians' enthusiasm for movement conservatism.