Just in May, just in Baghdad, sectarian violence killed 1,400 -- and that figure does not include victims of car bombs. It speaks depressing volumes about the U.S. predicament that the new idea is to . . . conquer Baghdad. On April 20 the Iraq war became as long as the Korean War. As of tomorrow the war will be as long -- 1,185 days -- as U.S. involvement in World War II was when U.S. troops captured the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen and became the first foreign troops to cross the Rhine since Napoleon's in 1805. And Baghdad beyond the Green Zone is a war zone, which accounts for the flight from the country of many educated and mobile Iraqis.

By the by, Scalia, writing for the majority, is happy to set his originalism aside and argue that the growth of “public-interest law firms and lawyers who specialize in civil-rights grievances ... [and] the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline ... [and] the increasing use of various forms of citizen review can enhance police accountability” all mean that the fourth amendment can be reinterpreted.

This is, of course, why I decline to take originalism seriously. Even its proponents pretty obviously understand that it's ridiculous to pretend that nothing has changed in the past 200 years, and they mostly use originalism as little more than intellectual cover for making the conservative rulings they want to make anyway. But when conservative rulings require that originalism be tossed overboard, they do so without apology. Some doctrine, eh?

It's true that Bush has been almost uniquely incompetent among modern presidents. But the real failure of the Bush years is a fundamental failure of ideology. For the first time since 1932, conservatives have controlled every branch of government. They had a chance to show they had a real governing ideology, and it turned out they didn't.

So: Are George Bush and Tom DeLay and Bill Frist real conservatives? Of course they are. They've failed because of that, not despite it.

For other takes on this theme, see my review of Bruce Bartlett's Impostor here and Jon Chait's takedown of conservative apostacy here.

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