“The sexual shenanigans of Mark Foley and their cover-up are less indicative of the collapse of conservatism in the Republican establishment than is the Iraq misadventure.

True, if establishment Republicans had the faintest affinity for conservatism, they’d have rid themselves of a member more at home in the Man/Boy Love Association. But more significantly, they’d quit pouring American blood and treasure down the Iraqi drain.

To follow the dictionary, a conservative is someone who seeks to preserve existing institutions, or to restore traditional ones. It is not that he disdains constructive change; rather, he wants it to grow organically from its cultural and political soil. A real conservative would therefore never graft democratic institutions onto a society in which adversaries have always assassinated—not outpolled—one another…”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, “Conservatives in Name Only.”