Moderates Finish Last and Drag Everyone Else Down With Them

General Colin Powell has positioned himself to be the face of “moderate” Republicans. Put aside for a moment that Powell proudly voted for the less than moderate Democrat, Barack Obama and ponder these words regarding Powell from Mark Steyn:

One of Powell's more famous utterances was his rationale, after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the Balkans: "We do deserts, we don't do mountains." Actually, by that stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush's decision, at Powell's urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day. As for the Kurds and Shia to whom it never occurred that the world's superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purposes of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly took a bloody revenge: that's an interesting glimpse of what it's like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell's much-vaunted "moderation."

Where has the centrist Powell’s version of moderation gotten us as a country? It has us fighting the same old battles over and over again with no chance of ever winning the war. This is what conservatives face in the form of the NRSC and the GOP party leadership.

The leaders of the Republican Party are so intent at playing the “moderate” game that they’ve aligned themselves with the lowest common denominator at the expense of their base. The result is that the lowest common denominator only rarely comes out to play and the stalwarts, the base, are fed up.

The NRSC and the party leadership need to get it through their thick heads that the base consists of conservatives, not moderates, not centrists and certainly not people who voted for Obama. Conservatism is alive and well. The Republican Party, not so much.