Should historians someday choose to reflect upon the demise of the Conservative movement in this country, they must examine the shards of ill begotten theory which peeled off and flew in all directions as the speeding hulk, having reached it’s full head of steam in the days and weeks after Sept. 11, literally ground itself into molten wreckage in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina with each idiotic profundity spewed forth by George W. Bush.

It finally came to a calamitous and very public end in the mid term election of 2006. Karl Rove and the dis-information ministry he controlled could no longer deceive the American people into believing that keeping Conservatives in power would un-say what Conservatives had said, nor undo what Conservatives had done.

They’d filleted and deep-fried themselves.

There was the idea that cutting revenue streams (taxes) would some how increase revenue. There was the idea that if rich people and corporations were unencumbered from taxes, between visits to the Lexus dealership they would pour those unfettered dollars into their businesses and hire new employees and the small boats would rise along with the economic tide created by the yachts.

There was the idea that if you make it more difficult for the poor to be poor, they would invariably pull themselves out of their poverty by one simple means, work. They failed to recognize, or simply didn’t care that each link in the chain of poverty is self-sustaining. Lack of education, lack of training, lack of medical care, lack of adequate housing, transportation and general economic opportunity due to a number of different factors including race and gender, tend to weight down the most needy among us making it impossible to keep their heads above water.

Single parents can’t work without childcare. Childcare has to be affordable or it’s unattainable. Poverty robs children of their learning potential making them far more likely to become a burden on the state than the children of the middle and upper class. The economic burden thus created on the economy is borne ultimately by the taxpayer.

Low wages are perpetuated as a necessary component of commerce because it holds down the cost of goods and services making us competitive. The very economic engine that drives the country is intended to perpetuate a state of poverty as a vital component of its success.

More than 40 million Americans have no health care coverage as a direct result of Conservative’s servility to insurance and drug companies, which fought to stop the attempt more than a decade ago to implement universal health insurance coverage for all citizens.

Then there was the idea that the way to energy independence was to put that national effort into the hands of the cabal of energy companies who’s very survival depends upon our dependence upon them. The truth is that were it not for the need for middle eastern oil, the political and social fires that have burned in that part of the world for millennia, would be as irrelevant to us today and in perpetuity, as the outcome of a checkers match in Deer Island Maine, with all due apologies to the kind folks of Deer Isle.

The idea that is posited by conservatism goes like this-

” Everyone, independently of others and the state, CAN achieve on their own and to an equal degree of potential, economic success and financial independence, if they simply try their best.”

That notion is as ridiculous as positing that every teen can forgo a formal education and simply opt to go into the NBA or the NFL. It ignores the fact that not everyone can manage an NFL offense anymore than can start and manage a company. Some people in our society can’t manage a war. Some can’t even manage their own affairs.

The Achilles heel of conservatism is in it’s own DNA. It’s the idea that individuals are just that; that they require nothing and owe nothing. They need nothing from others to survive and help to others comes at a price. It’s a service some enterprising capitalist can package and sell at a profit.

But the most enduring legacy of Conservatism is that its purveyors duped millions of religious Americans into embracing it for reasons that turned out to be canards. The number of abortions in this country has remained roughly unchanged since Roe v Wade. Conservatives have won election after election by embracing the idea of ending legal abortion.

And morality police, such as Pastor Ted Haggard, Congressman Mark Foley and now Senator Larry Craig, to name only a few, have shown that all who talk the talk, don’t necessarily walk the walk.