Quote of the day: Alan Wolfe and Frank Rich investigate why conservative "thought" leads directly to Bush-style government malfeasance

"Iraq failed for the same reasons that all conservative public policy efforts fail. Refusing to acknowledge the importance of government while relying on it to achieve your objectives causes the same kind of chaos in foreign policy that it does in matters closer to home."
—Alan Wolfe, in his article "Why Conservatives Can't Govern" in the July-August Washington Monthly

I expect to have more to say about the Wolfe article, and also about today's Frank Rich column, which sent me to it, "The Road From K Street to Yusufiya." For now, let me just offer one more tease from Wolfe, followed by Rich's parting shot.

Wolfe: "[T]oday's conservatives have no problem passing on the costs of their present madness to future generations. Governing well would require them to use the bully-pulpit of office to educate and uplift their base. But since contemporary conservatives get their political energy from angry voices of rage and revenge, they will always blame others for the failures built into their ideology."

Rich: "Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, the very model of big government that the current administration vilifies, never would have trusted private contractors to run the show. Somehow that unwieldy, bloated government took less time to win World War II than George W. Bush's privatized government is taking to blow this one."

You really should read both. Hey, it's Sunday—what else do you have to do?

(I hear that blogosphere types are busy having hissy fits about an attack on Kos by David "Silly Boy" Brooks in today's NYT. I had no idea anyone paid any attention to Silly Boy. I mean, if he gets any sillier, he'll soon be soaring off, from sheer substantive weightlessness, into the upper reaches of the chumposphere.)