And people say there’s no diversity on the right! There might be more black people in NASCAR than in the Repugnicans’ quickly shrinking “big” tent, (notice FOX News’s complete disavowel of race’s role in Michael Steele’s “prominence”), but the GOP might have enough cross-cutting diversity in its employment of language to make up for its monochromaticity.

Setting the stage for the first major post-Obama institutional cave-in, problems are mounting at William F Buckley’s beloved National Review. After losing two generations of Buckleys to (different versions of) reality, this bastion of intelligent conservatism, the magazine’s most popular writer, David Frum, is leaving to start his own site. Potentially more damaging, however, is the institution’s declining brand. Thoughtlessly virulent comment boards, (largely) unflinching support for Sarah Palin (we’ll get to this in a second), and the omnipresent threat of the new mediascape have conspired to tarnish the reputation of the magazine as a reasonable conservative voice.

Despite some notable detractors, the National Review’s support for Palin is inexplicable unless read as a truly selfless effort to keep the team together. Buckley, who was known for a biting wit and an extensive vocabulary certainly wouldn’t have supported this beautiful Palinism:

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

It’s hard to believe that Sarah Barracuda might get a $7 million book deal.

After eight years of ridicule being hurled at Bush for his Engrish, one might think that the right would want someone who speaks WELL (instead of good).

So where does this leave conservative discourse?

Since I’m sure that Joe The Plumber will do a great job “Securing Our Freedom” as Joe-The-Blogger, there might not be much use for thoughtful conservatives over there on the right. Since I doubt they’ll be able to win much support from the Repugnican rank-and-file, might their allegiances be up for grabs. I hear there are some academics who are looking for help running the country.

Though the serious infighting, undermining, and 2012 posturing started a couple weeks ago, things have really picked up in the week since the big day. The fault lines between the plutocrats and the Christian Nationalists are growing clearer by the day; both rookie Repugnicans and veterans of conservatism’s 90’s successes are lining up supporters and GOP dinner dates while trying to figure out how to position themselves vis-à-vis the triple failure of Bush, McCain, and Palin.

Still-President Bush back in his prime

Newt Gingrich, possibly sensing a chance to forestall Mitt Romney’s ascension as the leader of the plutocrats, made news today by arguing for a wholesale renunciation of the Bush Administration. Had the Maverick been able to successfully disown the failures of Still-President Bush (instead of trying to out-Bush his primary opponents) the election may have turned out differently. Gingrich here is counting on the success of a retrograde rebranding by counting on the power of conservatives’ memories of the good times of the Contract with America era, before congressional Repugnicans were best known for their lobbying scandals, corruption charges, and lascivious AIM convos.

It might work, but The Newt is betting on the return of a dated political paradigm that relies on a discourse of crime reduction, welfare reform, immigration restrictions, and tax cuts. This strategy’s success depends on voters not only forgetting about the impending (rec/depr)ession, young voters going home, and a post-Obama American mileu disavowing the Repugnicans’ (barely concealed) racist discourse. Indeed, Newt’s return to power would ignore the pseudoprogressive inclusiveness advocated by Bobby Jindal and Charlie Crist (even 1999’s Governor Bush reached out to Latinos) and think nothing of this year’s embarassingly monochromatic convention.

One might think – judging by Repugnican candidates’ eagerness to appear with Still-President Bush in the last few months – that everyone in the GOP would want to turn the page on the last eight years. But the Wall Street Journal inexplicably ran an Op-Ed last Wednesday arguing that we’ve all been unfair to Bush because we couldn’t see what his vision revealed.

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman’s low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman’s presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years — and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

One would think that the plutocratic WSJ would try to dump the blame for the administration’s failures at the feet of the Christian Nationalists. Maybe they don’t realize (or don’t want to) that they could be forced to pick sides in this conflict soon enough. Or maybe they have chosen sides.