One of the interesting disconnects between the left and right sides of the blogosphere is the often (well, sometimes anyway) genuine bewilderment that our conservative friends express as they contemplate the anger that pours so, well, liberally from any number of lefty keyboards. After all, they say, President Bush and the Republicans have done some pretty "progressive" things over the last four years, from pushing through a huge new prescription drug entitlement to engineering what amounts to a federal takeover of public education. What's so right-wing about that stuff? And, in a sense, they're right. President Bush and the GOP leaders in Congress have been anything but doctrinaire conservatives.

That said, politics isn't just a bloodless tally of position papers and issue scorecards. And if our conservative compatriots were to read Jim VandeHei's piece in today's WaPo -- and I mean really read it, as opposed to simply scouring the text for errors and errata that might be useful in trying to knock it down -- on the ways in which Republicans have fundamentally "changed how the business of government gets done" in DC in recent years, they might be a little less puzzled by all the lefty vituperation. Fact is, when you find yourself on the losing end of one battle after another because the other guy keeps changing the rules, you don't just feel disappointed. You feel cheated. And, frankly, you have a right to.

One of these days -- and perhaps sooner rather than later -- the GOP is going to be in the minority again. And if they've managed to turn virtually every Democrat in this country into a Delay or a Frist or a Dobson by that point, the reckoning for all this nonsense is going to be unpleasant, indeed -- and they'll have no one but themselves to blame when there aren't any moderate Dems left to stop the new gang in town from choosing justice over mercy.