Peggy Noonan's column in today's Wall Street Journal gushes about the one panel at last weekend's National Review Institute conference that struck a false note to my ear. It had a clever title, "What's Wrong with the Right?" but a less clever premise, that trashing the conservative base is the key to winning elections. So much for Reagan's 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican." A wag at my table quipped, "this panel is what's wrong with the right." Acknowledging faults and seeking to improve strategies are appropriate for a grand gathering of conservatives trying to understand how a failed president was re-elected. On this panel, however, Joe Scarborough, Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz bloviated about how anyone straying from far right orthodoxy was being "stifled." Noonan was quite taken with Joe Scarborough's critique: "I think the debate within the party has been stifled," [Scarborough] said. "It has been stifled because we have created this conservative groupthink over 30 years that's become more and more narrow. .....
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