'We'll get progress only through loss'...

A must-read from Peggy Noonan:

... The Republican establishment, the Republican elite, is quietly supporting those candidates and ideas they think should be encouraged. They are thinking about whom they will back in '08. But they're not thinking of this, most of them, with the old excitement. Because they sense, in their tough little guts, that the heroic age of the American presidency is, for now, over. No president is going to come along and save us, and Congress isn't going to save us. Events will cause a reckoning, and then we'll save ourselves. And in this we will refind our greatness. ...

Peggy Noonan is one of the best, and I agree with many of the points that she makes in this column. Bush and the GOP leadership in Congress have been a disappointment to conservatives in so many ways, and we need a change... but a change to the right, not to the left. Will a short-term left turn create a more positive bounce-back effect to the right? Maybe that's what it will take.