Instead, they associated Republicans with big government, corruption, sex scandals, and lying through their teeth.
And this is what the punditocracy is failing to understand. With the exception of Foley, all of the men responsible for these sins were self-identified, fire-breathing, far-right "conservatives".
You (not you specifically, but staunch conservatives in general) demanded that they pander to you rather than tell you the truth. You ignored that they were corrupt as long as they told you that the corruptions of your mind were still real.
We need to demand that our elected officials tell us the truth, whether or not that truth conflicts or coincides with our own beliefs. The ideological disease of the Club for Growth/Radio Talk Host/punditocracy is the same one that afflicts DailyKos/Liberal Blogosphere/MSNBC... it is a belief that if you keep repeating lies over and over again that somehow they will become reality.
We don't need more Tom Delays. We need more statesmen and stateswomen. We are allowing the Democrat Party to become the party of statesmenship by default, because we are absolutely failing to deal with the real problems that face Americans today. By our own hands, we have trashed conservatism, we have turned a once great ideology held by thinking men of principle, education, and valor into an ideological justification of selfishness, greed, and moral blindness.
Quite simply, we believed our own press. Hell, we created our own press to tell us, in fair and balanced fashion, that we were still right. These are not the activities of statesmen, these are the activities of megalomaniacs.
The only way that we will win, or even deserve to win, is if -- regardless of whether we describe ourselves as conservative, moderate, libertarian, or other -- we throw off the vestiges of ideological disease and deal with the world as it is, and it's problems as they are; not the world as we imagine it to be, and it's problems merely the fantasies of our opponents.
