Which isn’t to say that liberals are winning, merely that it’s hard to call random, senseless destruction “winning” unless you’re a nihilist. Jonathan Bernstein explains:

I don’t think that Mark Levin and Andy McCarthy and the rest of them are, for the most part, doing much harm to liberals; they undermine any effort to build a sensible conservative political movement. So you have conservative “wins” such as keeping Gitmo open or today’s decision about military commissions that basically have nothing whatsoever to do with any sort of consistent intellectual conservative ideas, but have more to do with whatever kinds of junk talk radio or Fox News hosts can come up with to keep their relatively small audience coming back for more.

This reminds me of the quote from last week by a Republican source who rejected cuts equivalent to mandatory spending because they only wanted to cut discretionary spending. Realistically, it should make little difference where the cuts come from, right? In fact, cutting waste out of defense would be preferable in my opinion. But no, it’s critical that discretionary spending be cut by some arbitrary number because this is how it works now: there’s no vision at work on the right, no philosophy. They find something through whatever arbitrary means they use and they get completely obsessed with it, spend inordinate amounts of energy trying to do it, and treat it as The Battle For America’s Soul. This is hardly how Reagan and Buckley operated, and the likelihood of it creating any sort of sustainable, free society is extremely small.