Now here's a shocker, at least to me, but then again I haven't visited the conservative HotAir's Ed Morrissey for a while. This morning he writes:
"In the wake of the trauma of the last two months, two inescapable questions emerge. First, what does it mean to be republican? And second, does the Republican Party represent those values at all any more?
"The answers to both have led me to disaffiliate myself from the GOP after the disgrace that took place in Congress last week…. At this point it’s impossible to act as though Republicans are republican, especially while its leadership makes clear that it doesn’t care one whit about the party’s own foundational principles."
Good for Mr. Morrissey. On the other hand, in his disaffiliating rage he commits two sins: He implies that republicanism has somehow been the exclusive intellectual property of the Republican Party, and perhaps more dumbfounding than sinful, he asserts, "What we have seen from Republicans over the last two months … has violated every single one of [republicanism's principles]."
Morrissey's boa-constricted timeline of Republicans' "journey" from dismissing republicanism — in brief, good citizenship and sober governance — to embracing neofascism ranks among the blindest of commentaries I have ever read.
It may be that since a bloody insurrection is what it took to compel the partisan withdrawal of so many recusant conservatives, then conservatism as we once knew it is dead, dead, dead.