Jim Geraghty channels Tony Robbins

Jim Geraghty caught my attention in 2004 with his Kerry Spot blog on NRO. Shortly after the election, he and Mrs. Kerry Spot moved to Turkey for her to pursue a professional opportunity, and his writing delved a little bit to deeply into Turkish delights for my tastes.

However, he seems recently to have been gradually pulling out of that malaise, and today's column is a good example. In it, he responds to another NRO blogger who had expressed his disgust with the current administration by calling it "the most politically and substantively inept that the nation has had in over a quarter of a century."

Geraghty, channeling inspirational speaker Tony Robbins, points out that conservatives with similar thoughts on Bush have two choices:

They can push for the ideas that they believe strongly in, and take their message to the people. (Rich offers a good agenda; I would just add that the administration ought to point to Europe. The continent is demonstrating every day why larger, more intrusive government with more regulations and higher taxes eventually reaches a point where it just can't work. In France and Italy, problems just don't get solved anymore and voter cynicism is off the charts. In Germany, Merkel's fighting the good fight, but has an uphill climb.)

Or conservatives can throw up their hands and say, "I'm through with this, I'm leaving the party, all of this is pointless."

With option one, conservatives may win, or they may lose. On option two, they will definitely lose.

That's why, for all my distaste over some of the Bush administration's policies and weariness over its missteps, I can't choose option two. The answer is not withdrawal -- the answer is to push for what's right, to oppose what's wrong, and to work for a permanent Republican majority.