Hey, conservative base…

…you’re gonna get establishment picks and you’re gonna like ‘em!

We’ll see about that, Karl. While no one doubts that candidates for office ideally should be clever enough to avoid falling into the traps set for them by the liberal media, principles do count. The only thing truly impressive Rove ever did was get George W. Bush elected, twice. Now, I think Bush is a decent man, and he was infinitely preferable to the Democratic alternatives; however, he did a great deal of damage to the Republican Party through his push for big-government entitlement programs, and, after the initial victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, letting the military situation bog down for nearly two years in a kind of strategic coma, during which time events began deteriorating with little or no explanation coming from the White House prior to the surge (the decision to clam up during this period was also Rove’s). This is not the stuff of which a liberal roll-back is made.

And if Rove’s amusingly-named organization – the Conservative Victory Project – is primarily interested in addressing, say, the Todd Akin problem (and Akin, incidentally, was not the Tea Party’s preferred candidate in the primary that gave him the nod), just what are we to do about the McCain/Graham problem: establishment types whose slippery and highly malleable principles rather frequently result in their smilingly lining up with the ideological heirs of the late, unlamented Ted Kennedy? Rove, of course, doesn’t see these guys as a problem, but as the backbone of the Party (scoliosis as strategy, I suppose).

Increasingly, I am getting the impression that Rove and like-minded Republican operators believe, in their heart of hearts, that America has, indeed, reached the point of no return, and they are just trying to do what they can to ensure that the inevitable cultural and economic apocalypse doesn’t descend until they are either safely retired behind their walled compounds sitting comfortably atop their ill-gotten gains, or perhaps dead, and therefore beyond caring about the wrath of those whose trust they have betrayed.

Conservatives owe Rove nothing, and they will owe the Republican Party nothing if it decides that its main function is to reconstitute itself as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Incumbents.