The job of conservatives is to keep the Republican Party driving on the right-hand side of the road. There are many ways we do this. We argue, we publish, we lobby, we campaign for conservative candidates. Another thing we do is, when the GOP goes off the rails on really key issues - size of government, the National Question, Wilsonian adventures - we stay home on election day.

What does the Right have to show for eight years of a Republican presidency? I supported George W. Bush in 2000 because I thought he had a conservative bone in his body somewhere. I supported him in 2004 because I thought him the lesser of two evils. At this point, I wouldn't let the fool park his car in my driveway. Bruce Bartlett was right, every damn word.

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.

Asked if Stalin was an antisemite, Robert Conquest replied: Yes, but it hardly noticed. He was broadly and generously anti-human.

The job of conservatives is to keep the Republican Party driving on the right-hand side of the road. There are many ways we do this. We argue, we publish, we lobby, we campaign for conservative candidates. Another thing we do is, when the GOP goes off the rails on really key issues - size of government, the National Question, Wilsonian adventures - we stay home on election day.

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.