E.J. Dionne on the GOP meltdown:

President Bush inadvertently underscored the weakness of the Republican agenda when he flew to Bridgeport, Conn., on Wednesday to campaign for his health savings accounts, known as HSAs. Virtually no one other than the president — oh, and perhaps a few ideologues and insurance companies — sees HSAs as anything approaching a comprehensive solution to the nation’s growing health-care problem.

Senate Republicans have already dropped HSAs from their budget, and Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the Finance Committee chairman, has been openly skeptical about doing anything on HSAs this year. The president was thus campaigning for a doomed idea in Connecticut when, just over the border in Massachusetts, a bipartisan majority in the legislature was passing a visionary plan requiring all residents to buy health insurance and providing subsidies for those who can’t afford the full freight. The contrast between the policy energy that exists in many states and the intellectual torpor in Washington could not have been more stark.

Remember what I said about Bush becoming irrelevant?

Dionne’s point is that conservatism is becoming irrelevant. It may be a little early to make that pronouncement, but we’re certainly stumbling in that direction. Just start counting the many ways in which this nation is bleeped up, and then trace the problem back to its source — policies based on conservative ideology. And this is exactly why the Republican-controlled federal government can’t solve those problems. “Republicans are paralyzed because they can’t deal with the core problems without walking away from their earlier policy choices,” says Dionne.

Why is the federal government so impotent to reform the nation’s health care mess? Because of conservatives. For years we haven’t even been able to have a coherent national discussion on health care, because righties shout it down. So the President goes on the road to sell meaningless tweaks as some kind of solution, and he’s so irrelevant even his own party is ignoring him.

Why are we in Iraq? You know the answer to that one.

Why do we have a bleeping out-of-control deficit? “It took no great genius to see that cutting taxes in a time of war and other security threats would create large problems,” says Dionne. “The contradiction between the current majority’s small-government rhetoric and heavy federal spending has been visible for years.” Visible to anyone but righties. As long as Democrats were in control of at least part of the federal government and were the ones mostly responsible for writing the budget, righties could jeer about “tax and spend liberals.” But given the responsibility of making the hard choices themselves, righties proved they can’t do it.

“Big spending on war, defense and prescription drugs for the elderly, combined with big tax cuts, produces a fiscal squeeze,” says Dionne. Not to mention the uncontrolled pork. At this point the only solution is to either raise taxes or declare bankruptcy and turn the country over to the foreign banks who hold most of our IOUs. But you know the Republicans’ heads would explode before they’d raise taxes. They’ll put the nation in hock to China first.

Bottom line, hard-right ideology doesn’t work in the real world. In that way it’s like Marxism — sounds good when you talk about it, turns out bad when you try to do it.

This is not to say that we should run all conservatives out of town. We’ll always need people at the government table making an argument against excess spending, social engineering, and foreign entanglements — what conservatives used to argue about. It’s a necessary counterweight to some of the flightier impulses of liberals.

But I tend to be skeptical of ideology, period. (See Jonathan Chait, “The Anti-Dogma Dogma“). Ideologies are, IMO, just interfaces to reality. They make the world easier to understand by limiting one’s choices and narrowing one’s focus. But it’s the stuff ideologues refuse to acknowledge — because it’s not written into the interface — that always trips ’em up. And this is just as true of leftie ideology as it is of rightie ideology.

But liberalism is, IMO, less an ideology than a value. John F. Kennedy said,

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

Conservatism, on the other hand, seems to be rooted in the idea that people must be controlled by authority. And if they can’t be controlled by law, then they will be controlled by lies, manipulation, deceit, and propaganda. And right now the same deluded rightie Kool-Aiders who yap about Bush promoting “freedom” are sowing the seeds of totalitarianism as fast as they can.

Yet we can hope they are also sowing the seeds of their own self-destruction. The results of their own actions have boxed them in. They can’t even address our nation’s problems because, more often than not, it was their lamebrain policies that caused the problems, or else made an existing problem worse. And “stay the course” is not a policy, especially when most Americans can see we’re going the wrong way.

The extent to which Democrats signed on to rightie policies in the past — out of fear or political expedience or because they were righties themselves all along — compromises them, of course. Just when we need a pride of lions, we get a pond full of toads. But that’s another rant.

Let’s end on a positive note. If you want another clue to Bush’s irrelevancy, check out yesterday’s Froomkin column.

President Bush is throwing Vice President Cheney to the wolves — or, more specifically, to the Nationals fans.

According to longstanding precedent, one of the two of them had to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the home opener of Washington’s home team on Tuesday — and face the inevitable boos and catcalls.

Bush is sending Cheney.

Heh.