From a reader:

Spot on, Jonah!
You don’t get from, say, Barry Goldwater to Condoleezza Rice by virtue of a series of Meetup.com events. Yglesias may be catching on to that,
and I think that both of you understand that it took decades of debate,
research, thousands of hours of “Firing Line”, hundreds of NR issues,
“Human Events”, the Reagan Insurgency, to come up with a coherent world
view called “Conservative Republicanism”.
Conservatives are torqued with Bush and Rove because many of us are
convinced that the Reagan heritage that had its origins in Goldwaterism
(and you are correct, the two strands are different) is being
consciously rejected by this White House. Bush can get away with much
because of the War. However, the corner has been turned on this war,
and with victory in sight, the seams in the Party are apparent. No
crackup, to be sure, but seams that can be exploited by a canny
Democrat like our friend Hillary.
In a sense, Andrew Sullivan’s jeremiads have been prescient. He is
worth listening to when it comes to government spending, while we can
safely ignore his base killing advice on gay marriage. As for the
Donks; if you go to the magazines or to the websites, where -is- the
intellectual vitality (other than Peter Beinart, John Chait, and
several others) that separates thinking liberals from the
“BushHitler-Lied-They-Died” Crowd?
The fact that millions of liberals flocked to see “Farenheit 9/11″ and
believed what they saw as received fact should tell you all you need to
know about modern liberalism and the far Left’s hold on it today.