The forthcoming issue of Commentary is being headilned by Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson plotting “the path to Republican revival”.  While we should expect nothing else from these two veterans of and apologists for the Bush White House, it is nevertheless stunning to see the degree to which they will not retreat one inch from the dogmas of “compassionate conservatism”.

After an unoriginal summary of the state of American Politics in the summer of 2009, any illusions that the authors are interested in a genuine Republican comeback by exploiting Obama’s weaknesses on health care and related issues is put in hand with this thesis statement:

Any serious attempt to revivify the GOP might begin with a full-throated stand for a strong national defense.

It gets worse:

Obama’s effective freeze of defense spending over the next five years is inconsistent with American global commitments. Republicans would be astute to offer as an alternative an increase in defense spending in the range of 4 percent real growth per year, including support for an ambitious missile-defense program to counter the rising ballistic threats from North Korea and Iran.

To say nothing of this overly optimistic assessment:

In response, some Republicans have been tempted to promote their own brand of retreat from global engagement out of the belief that, the cause of democratic internationalism having been severely damaged by the war in Iraq, the GOP should seize the mantle of foreign policy “realism.”

As if this weren’t enough exposure for the neocons’ delusions about the present appetite of the American people for new foreign wars, the author of Bush’s promise to end tyranny in our world insists on once again breaking out into The Internationale:

A moral component to our foreign policy is, moreover, part of the American DNA. It would have been impossible to maintain the seemingly endless exertions of the Cold War without the American people’s instinctual concern for those held captive and their no less instinctual abhorrence of oppression.  Since the midpoint of the last century, this has been the GOP’s watchword. Among younger Americans focused on global issues like genocide, poverty, women’s rights, religious liberty, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, it can resonate loudly.

Lest we suspect that this manifesto of the Neoconservative Refoundation Party is limited to reaffirming the global democratic revolution, think again.  With no less delusion Wehner and Gerson insist that No Child Left Behind was a smashing success and that we must therefore charge full speed ahead in crushing the teachers unions, and most incredulously of all that the GOP can yet win over Hispanic and other immigrant voters by continuing the economic and social policies that created the exurban McMansion country now decaying into a hispanic slum.  Indeed, the new 8-mile could hardly be a more perfect metaphor for the failure of George W. Bush’s America.

Alas, in all aspects of both foreign and domestic policy, the court intellectuals of that America have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.