I've lately been promoting a book I wrote on the plight of the mainline Christian denominations, featuring the Episcopal Church as Exhibit A in the Trainwreck Chronicles.

An interviewer asked me: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of these churches? I replied: I'm too old to be pessimistic. A blog commenter ventured that that was kinda contradictory, in that "old" folks are usually, and rightly, more pessimistic than the young.

Well, I'm not really all that old (despite remembering the Eisenhower administration with clarity and appreciation), but there's this about antiquity: You learn during your passage through it that, whatever it is, this, too, shall pass. Great times, hard times, a rising real estate market, a collapsing political party. There's always a banana peel out there for the newly triumphant to step on unawares.

Over the past five or six months, we've all drunk the deep, dour tidings about the GOP: finished, gone, outta here.

Ummm-hmmm. A few Democrats and more than a few Republicans, ought, for the sake of clarity, to cast their gazes back a few years: 2004 would do. Hammered by the Rove-Bush machine, Democrats and the pundits who love them wallowed in grief, braced themselves for a long period of Republican ascendancy. Not unlike, perhaps, the long period of Democratic ascendancy that was projected to follow Lyndon Johnson's burial of Barry Goldwater, and the conservative cause, in 1964. That noonday moment ended four years later, when Richard Nixon slid past Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. Then there was Watergate. The Republicans were dead, dead, dead, once again.

When are we finally going to catch on? No matter who wins today, someone else will win tomorrow. The question arises in terms of a pessimism deep and black that envelops conservatives: the opposite of that radiance in which liberals bathe as they await the advent of a hard-hitting liberal nominee to the Supreme Court and the enactment of health care, global warming-control, and heaven knows what other joys.

Republicans don't seem to know what to do. Move left, move right, stand still? Arlen Specter's apostasy gives Senate Democrats virtually a veto-proof majority. Says the Pew Research Center; "[T]he GOP has lost roughly a quarter of its base over the past five years." Doesn't anybody like us anymore? GOP leaders blubber. Continued...