Ross Douthat’s debut column for the New York Times begins with a good joke, designed (one might think) to have the Upper West Side howling that all the talk of young Mr Douthat being a conservative we can do business with must be so much baloney:
But Ross makes a persuasive case that the country could have benefitted from a discussion of national security and interrogation policies during the campaign and, vitally, that Cheney’s landslide defeat would have awoken the GOP to the fact that the electorate did not decide to elect a Democrat to puish the GOP for having abandoned the comforting rigours of conservative orthodoxy. But that, alas, is the message it has imagined for itself.Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.
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