Attention, please:

From the WaPo comes this question:

Is conservatism finished?

Conservatism was always a delicate balancing act between small-government economic libertarians and social traditionalists who revered family, faith and old values. The two wings were often held together by a common enemy, modern liberalism certainly, but even more so by communism until the early 1990s, and now by what some conservatives call "Islamofascism."

President Bush, his defenders say, has pioneered a new philosophical approach, sometimes known as "big-government conservatism." The most articulate defender of this position, the journalist Fred Barnes, argues that Bush's view is "Hamiltonian" as in Alexander, Thomas Jefferson's rival in the early republic. Bush's strategy, Barnes says, "is to use government as a means to achieve conservative ends."

Kudos to Barnes for trying bravely to make sense of what to so many others -- including some in conservative ranks -- seems an incoherent enterprise. But I would argue that this is the week in which conservatism, Hamiltonian or not, reached the point of collapse...

(read on)

But don't break out the champagne yet, Bubbles. Paleocondude, I think, is not entirely wrong when he says this:

The decline of conservatism leaves a vacuum in American politics. An unhappy electorate is waiting to see who will fill it.

What he means, of course, is that the decline of liberalism and old-school leftieism isn't even worth mentioning; the Old American Left is an ex-parrot.

Wanna prove him wrong? Or at least put something in the vacuum (for there is a vacuum, make no mistake; and has been for quite a while) more to your liking?

Best get cracking.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

And the old "pendulum" may not be as reliable as you think.