WINNING ISN'T EVERYTHING... I repeat myself, but isn't it a great indicator of conservatism's basic unseriousness that many of its leading lights are plumping for the apolitically ambitious Arnold Schwarzenegger?

"Schwarzenegger Comes Through!" gushes NRO third-stringer Peter Robinson over Ahnold's transparently Golden-Bear-baiting, non-Bartlett's-contending soundbites (e.g., "Before you promise anything to anyone right now, I think stop. Stop, stop, stop with the spending"). Based on such feeble evidence, Robinson compares Schwarzenegger flatteringly to Ronald Reagan. One is tempted to answer: No, Reagan's feeble-mindedness is caused by Alzheimer's, not steroid abuse, and the Gipper had an at least moderate range of interests (movies, politics, horses, Barnaby Jones), whereas Arnold Schwarzenegger has, judging from his behaviors, a genuine interest in Arnold Schwarzenegger and not much else.

Robinson, say this for him, plays it cagey and leaves his accounting of the Reagan/Schwarzenegger link murky: "The most important parallel between Schwarzenegger and Reagan? That's still developing," Robinson admits; but "when Reagan was elected president in 1980, there was no consensus on what should be done -- but there was a consensus that something had to be done." Well, Ahnold will do something, all right. Invite Rob Lowe and a few "friends" to the Governor's mansion for a sleepover, perhaps, or push through a bill mandating for himself a better seat at the Oscars. But other than that, what? Only his publicist knows for sure.

I am guessing that the real Reagan/Schwarzenegger "parallel" is simply that Ahnold is in movies and can win. Perhaps this is enough. That conservatives would like to lay siege to any Democratic redoubt is unsurprising -- but it's downright alarming to consider the price they're now willing to pay for victory. We knew (via the 2000 election and the 2001 campaigns) that they would employ any means to win, but that they would employ such a flawed vessel as Schwarzenegger shows a definite lowering of standards.

Mere weeks after the massive shitfit pitched by the Right over the Supreme Court's anti-sodomy decision (and amid its lingering cultural fallout -- see Robinson's fellow bench-warmer Tim Graham's bitching about TV gays), the new Great Right Hope is pro-gay, pro-choice, and otherwise not especially on board with the Roger Chillingworth wing of the movement. Poor Judge Roy Moore! As he risks his career for a statue of the Ten Commandments in Alabama, those who should be his natural defenders lavish their attention on a Tinseltown muscleman.

Elsewhere at NRO, Bruce Bartlett bites his nails over "Big-Government Conservatism." It seems to perplex BB that such a lovely, reactionary fellow as W would forsake true conservative principals just to win voter approval with handouts of public money. How I would love to see W reading (or having read to him) Bartlett's piece, and to hear his contemptuous laughter!

At home, as in Iraq, the illusion of victory seems to be enough for these guys. It is fitting that they now prostrate themselves before a showman.