From Think Progress

In recent days, several of President Bush's closest advisers have been attacking President Obama. Vice Preisdent Cheney, for example, said that there was "high probability" of a WMD attack if Bush's policies were reversed, and former chief of staff Andy Card said that Obama has turned the White House into a "locker room" because he isn't requiring staff to wear jackets at all times. Axelrod sharply responds to the "tasteless" criticisms in a new interview with the Washington Post:

"I was disappointed in the Vice President's comments, ...

You know, the last thing that I think we're looking for at this juncture is advice on fiscal integrity or ethics from Karl Rove, anyone who's read the newspapers for the last eight years would laugh at that.

...I mentioned Andy Card saying that we were somehow denigrating the Presidency because people were wearing short sleeves in the Oval Office. We're wearing short sleeves because we have to roll up our sleeves and clean up the mess that we inherited."

Reading Tannehaus's Essay "Conservatism is Dead" in the New Republic he makes the case what the Obama, Democratic Congress and the entire US Society is up against:

Yet, even as the right begins to regroup, it is not clear that its leaders have absorbed the full implications of their [party's] defeat. They readily concede that the Democrats are in charge and, in Obama, have a leader of rare political skills. Many on the right also admit that the specific failures of the outgoing administration were legion. But what of the verdict issued on movement conservatism itself?

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions [political pragmatism]. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare. [AKA the Cultural War]

They, the now Republicans, now the completely taken over by the right are now cornered like a wounded animal where they occupy the proverbial political place of irrelevance, as authored by the former Senator Hagel, who happened to be one of the last 'Burkian' Republicans who expressed the concepts of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. 

But what of the time honored tradition that the previous Administration who were able to silence their criticisms following recent transitions. Today that is gone for the right revolution is on life-support politically.  The right knows they are facing obsolesce, both as the numbers in elected seats attest and a few conscious ones know they failed to perform the essential component to sustain any political power---ultimately every government, every ideology, every political movement is eventually measured by its ability to use it powers to make better its own society, otherwise it turns into a reactionary goon squad. Is that not what the Bush Administration emerged to be?  Tannehaus continues:

One reason is that the most intellectually sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right [the original neo-con's] but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor. In place of the Marxist dialectic they formulated a Manichaean politics of good and evil, still with us today, and their strategy was to build a movement based on organizing cultural antagonisms. [social conservatives, evangelical conservatives, paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives]. Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy--"statist" social programs; "socialized medicine"; "big labor"; "activist" Supreme Court justices, the "media elite"; "tenured radicals" on university faculties; "experts" in and out of government.  But, if it's clear what the right is against, what exactly has it been for? This question has haunted the movement from its inception in the 1950s, when its principal objective was to undo the New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s.

Ahh the reason we locked into this solidarity of opposition by the Congressional Republicans who are now dominated by the right's ideologues, is it . They are fixated against the New Deal, its new social contract of relevancy, of actually solving intolerable problems of the industrial-capitalist society expressed by things like "socialized medicine" while 50M Americans are uninsured. They are opposed to fiscal regulation while we know speculation becomes rampant when commercial banks are merged with investment banks. They opposed modern governance and why they hold Reagan as a pseudo deity in his ideology that "government is the enemy" where in reality that statement held the the entire objective to undo the New Deal.

That is really what Rove's ideal of a permanent Republican majority that fell apart the day a hurricane came to Louisiana's shores. At each juncture the right's ideology failed to solve basic governance competency and yet they scream and holler about shirt sleeves, torture and fiscal responsibility. What they are screaming about is not shirt sleeve style, they are hollering that once this generation sees an actual effort and results of making government work their basic mantra is dead, except for their own echo chambers. Tannehaus says conservatism is dead, I say then lets bury too, dressed in their suits and ties and along with Limbaugh and O'Reilly's megaphones.