In the year 2000, a devastating blow was dealt to conservative ideology. They were at long last given simultaneous control of all parts of government, and a chance to implement their philosophies.

The outcome proved, of course, to be a fiasco of monumental proportions. From budget surpluses to record deficits; unchecked pork; a tide of corruption, both moral and legal, that thinned their ranks like smallpox; mismanagement of even basic government tasks, such as emergency response capabilities; a national economy constantly teetering between mere sluggishness and outright recession; the entrance into a quagmire of a war, one with unclear initial purpose and even less clear strategies for exit. And those are just the highlights.

It would be enough to drive even the most sane person to despair; in fact, the more sane you are, the more likely you are to feel despair over any of these things. With the agonizing lack of grace of a faceplanting pole vaulter, and in every realm -- economics, oversight, foreign policy, etc. -- conservatism unleashed into the real world met, once again, with abject and humiliating failure. It seems there is no aspect of government that conservatism is actually good at, once the adherents are given any more responsibilities than being the besuited blowhards of Washington cocktail parties.

I thought it might be appropriate, at this point, to go over the five conservative stages of grief. They are taken directly from Kubler-Ross, and so are solidly backed by the best psychological modeling. In their moments of understandable despair over actually having finally been given the unfair and dastardly opportunity to put their signing pens where their mouths have been, as opposed the previous years of merely erupting, geyserlike, on Fox News every evening about what they could do if they were in charge, it is expected that most conservatives will at this point go through at least some of these stages of grief. Since we are not ogres, here, we will simply wish them well and pray for their speedy recovery.



Stage 1: John McCain. In the McCain stage of grief, a conservative is mentally aware of their surroundings but unable to emotionally process the information. The result is a mental short-circuit. Sufferers are especially prone to thinking that the Iraq War is going spectacularly well; they may even wander open-air marketplaces in which they are protected by a hundred or more fully armed United States soldiers, with helicopter gunship support, and remark aloud at how normal and stable and safe their location obviously is. Denial may also exist over the state of the economy, of their own party, or, especially, their own past actions.

The McCain stage of grief is known to last years or even decades. Fortunately, the sufferer usually loses all concept of time, such that they cannot differentiate between any particular six month period, and will eventually declare them all to be "a hundred years" long.



Stage 2: Rudy Giuliani. The Giuliani stage of grief is marked by constant, seething anger. Individuals may reduce their entire range of emotional responses to one, that of constant, self-righteous rage. The stage is usually accompanied by Napoleonic fantasies, declaring the fearsome breadth of their own inner fury to be the only salvation not just of themselves, but of the entire world in which they live. Every situation, every social interaction, and every problem is met with a frequently irrational and always militant response.

Long-term sufferers of the Giuliani stage may eventually suffer from a permanent bug-eyed expression and the onset of sociopathy. They may sometimes be mistaken for necrophiliacs.



Stage 3: Mitt Romney. In the Romney stage, the full impact of the conservative situation begins to become clear to the individual, who then begins to attempt to extricate themselves from their predicament through the process of bargaining.

Sufferers may, upon recognizing the unpopularity of past positions, shift those positions wildly from one year to the next, one week to the next, or even during consecutive sentences. They are driven by a need for popularity and acceptance, and are willing to tailor their speech, behavior, and even their thoughts to whatever may be necessary to obtain it. Sufferers of the Romney stage of grief are aware of their surroundings and the negative situation they are in, and are even aware of how their behavior may have contributed to the failure, but lack the mental ability to then adapt their behaviors as a result of those past failures. Instead, they flit haphazardly from idea to idea, from constituency to constituency, looking to empty sloganeering and focus group ideas to rebuild the trust that they have lost.



Stage 4: Fred Thompson. Eventually, sufferers of conservative grief may become distant and despondent, entering the Thompson stage. Individuals may retreat into isolation, even if they are currently supposed to be running for President of the United States or something. While they can sometimes be goaded into action, say, for an evening debate, they are more prone to minimalist activities, such as making a few phone calls, showing up at a county fair, or merely driving around in a truck.

Sufferers of the Thompson stage are fully aware of past conservative failures, but are unable to make even token attempts at new ideas or substantively critiquing the old ones. They become stiff and emotionless, as if a writers' strike is incapacitating them. They may begin to age creepily and horribly.



Stage 5: Mike Huckabee. Finally, the Huckabee stage may be reached. In this stage, the grief sufferer finally comes to term with the situation for himself and his fellow conservatives. He realizes fully how he has been used; he realizes fully how shallow and insincere conservative behavior has been; he realizes that there is little way to change the situation. He may surround himself with trivialities or attempts at obvious self-deprecation in order to make light of the situation; for example, using elderly b-list television action stars as inexplicable campaign props.

Nonetheless, acceptance of the situation is achieved. In the Huckabee stage, the individual no longer grieves for the losses of conservatism, but comes to accept them as the reality of the movement, and nothing that either can or should be changed. Token apologies for past behavior may be issued, with the full internal knowledge that those transgressions will be repeated in the future.

Individuals that reach the Huckabethan stage of conservative grief may achieve serenity and spirituality; the stage is frequently accompanied by the belief that no matter how bad the situation is, those tragedies and failures were preordained by God, who will return at any moment to kick the asses of all those that may now stand in your way.

These seemingly baseless assertions of preordained destiny and of imminent divine intervention on your personal behalf may not be emotionally rational, but it at least allows the individual a cognitive basis for continuing their conservatism even in the wake of obvious and dramatic movement-wide failures. In this manner, a conservative can continue to remain conservative indefinitely, or at least until their conservatism results in another multi-fronted national crisis.