David Weigel, who covers the conservatives for The Washington Independent, writes that the party's over for what Slate's Tim Noah called "the wellspring of President Bush’s worst ideas."
My TWI colleague reports: Conservative Think Tank Adjusts to Tough Times
The buzz at this year’s American Enterprise Institute gala was, ironically enough, about how much easier it was to get inside. For eight years, entering the annual black tie dinner — put on by the influential conservative think tank that supplied the George W. Bush administration with dozens of high-level officials — meant sharing a vast hotel ballroom with the president or vice president, which meant extra scrutiny of your car and a security checkpoint to screen for weapons.
... its graduates include former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, former Treasury Secretary John Snow, and Dick Cheney himself.
Now that they've run the United States of America right into the ground, I suppose they're all sitting around trying to figure out what went wrong. Here's a clue for them: Atlas Shrugged is second rate fiction at best, and not a sound foundation for serious economic theory. AEI depends on (surprise) corporate largess to fill it coffers. When your policies have turned blue chip stocks into penny stocks, perhaps its time to add more books to your library -- or better yet, put a president in office who actually reads books.