There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Republican Party moderating its message, especially on social issues, but Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin points out that among the party’s grassroots the only appetite is for change in the other direction:

But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies – as always – through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense.

Meanwhile, the latest Washington Post poll gives little indication that this is about to work:

I think you have to be sympathetic to grassroots conservatives who don’t like hearing from Steve Schmitt and Megan McCain and others that the right should give way on gay marriage, at a time when the correct, pro-equality position is still sufficiently unpopular that most leading Democrats won’t adopt it. But in general if you don’t moderate on anything, then you’re basically leaving the fate of the Republican Party entirely in Barack Obama’s hands. If he screws up in an utterly spectacular way (see Bush, George W.) then there’s no telling what kind of agenda can win. But if not, then this’ll let Democrats win by default.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, the United States of America suffered by far the worst terrorist attack in its history. Bush responded to this with policies that led to the deaths of substantially more innocent Americans than died on 9/11, to say nothing of orders of magnitude more foreign civilians. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of 9/11 remained at large, and hundreds of other innocent civilians were killed by terrorists in allied nations. This, according to conservatives, is success. Thus Noemi Emery in The Weekly Standard saying the record proves the need to torture:

Let’s tell the truth about Bush’s conduct of the war on terror, which is that it’s been a success. His ultimate legacy hasn’t been written–Iraq is improved, but not out of danger–but the one thing that can be said without reservation is that the country was kept safe. He delivered on the main charge of his office in time of emergency, in a crisis without guidelines or precedent. Attacks took place in Spain, and in London, in Indonesia and India, but not on American soil, which was the obvious target of choice. Bush couldn’t say this before he left office, for obvious reasons, and after he left, attention switched to the new president.

This is via Matt Duss. I find this whole line of argument truly and deeply baffling. The overwhelming majority of Americans to ever be killed by foreign terrorists were killed during Bush’s presidency. And even if you give him a pass on 9/11 itself it’s still the case that his conduct of the “war on terror” led to the deaths of thousands more Americans.

Back in the summer of 2003, the right’s big idea was that the bombing of the UN compound in Iraq was not, as it first seemed, a bad thing. Rather, it actually demonstrated that we were making progress in Iraq and the opposition was growing desperate. My post on that theory is lost to the vicissitudes of linkrot, but it was BS then and it doesn’t sound much more convincing today:

Earlier, Mrs. Clinton described the violence as the last gasp of “rejectionists” who feared that the government would succeed in creating a united and peaceful Iraq. The attacks, she said, are “in an unfortunately tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear that Iraq is going in the right direction.”

More likely, the uptick in violence signals exactly what it seems to signal. The surge never produced political reconciliation, and in the absence of political reconciliation violence is resuming. Nir Rosen has an excellent rundown of the background to these incidents. He’s also quite confident that Maliki and his government will prevail in any renewed violent struggle. So in that sense, yes, Clinton may be right to say that this doesn’t augur a return to chaos. But it’s not a sign of progress.