The Optimistic Conservative:

Truly, can there be such a creature? David Brooks thinks the outlook for America's future is bright because we are a far more diverse country than China or Germany. (He doesn't mention India or any of several Latin American countries, perhaps in the latters' case because we just never bother to think of them beyond our never ending drug wars.)

Brooks argues that American culture is far more "permeable" than any other society, and he has an excellent point. The current concern, however, is with his fellow conservatives who seem to want nothing more than to return the country to the powers who bulldozed the country into near collapse during the Bush regime. Already leading Republicans, like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are already beating the drums of war with Iran, arguing that we can fight our way out of the current Great Recession just as we did during World War II. (Like that worked so well in the first decade of this century.) Graham and his ilk must intend to re-instate the draft, because otherwise that just won't work. (See Roger Cohen in today's New York Times.)

Such conservatives are the same folks who will tell you from one side of their mouths that World War II saved the country from the Great Depression, not FDR, and then speaking from the other side of their mouths remind you that the war marked the beginning of the great national debt and deficit spending from which the country has never managed to extract itself.