Maybe Jeb Bush is right.

Maybe Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush would have a hard time getting a Republican nomination in today's GOP.  That's like saying Dwight Eisenhower or Calvin Coolidge would also.

Jeb, however personally high we hold your great father, and the even greater Ronald Reagan, hasn't the world changed in the last twenty years?  Are today's Democrats of Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Sharpton and the other radicals of the left the same as the Democrats of Tip O'Neil and Scoop Jackson's time?  Are liberal/progressives in government, academia and the old stooge media, the people who attacked your brother with every lie, calumny and hypocrisy and continue today, three and a half years after he left office, calling for common ground?

Where did all of that reaching across the aisle get us, I mean "us the country" and not just "us" the party?  Has not government grown in every sector of it and our existence? 

Has massive government control over the economy through a myriad of tax breaks, subsidies and regulations made our economy stronger than it was 30 or 40 years ago?  Do Americans have more savings?  Are the savings we have safer?

Are more small business starting and succeeding or have we become a country of increasingly concentrated economic power, from which the largest of corporations interact with the government in a twisted parasite/host relationship, more twisted by the obscurity of which is the host and which the parasite?

Are our children being better educated than they were 30 or 40 years ago.  All objective evidence says no.  Are our universities dominating global research and turning out articulate and open minded liberal arts students?

After all the federal money spent on "poverty", does poverty remain?  Has the liberal social model of "tolerance" for every form of sexual depravity strengthened or destroyed our family structure?

Are we a kinder, gentler society?

After twenty-five years of military build down are we safer and more dominant in global affairs?

The same campus radicals that wrote theses on Alinsky (Hilary) and glorified radical revolutions (Barack) are the new Democrats.  The baby-boomer liberals didn't fly bombers in World War Two like George McGovern, they protested Vietnam.  Their children are worse.  At least we baby boomers were educated in a public system that didn't equate George Washington and Abraham Lincoln with Franklin Pierce and Franklin Buchanan in an ecumenical "President's Day", and learned something of real American history.   Today the liberals that control our schools and teach our children the only freedoms are sexual and drug related, with all other decisions better made by the collective than the individual.  We really have raised a generation that think Lincoln was a Democrat and George Wallace a Republican.

Moreover, the liberal progressives hate us.  Conservative thought is routinely compared to Nazi ideology, in public and our schools.  The modern liberal denies even the right of conservatives to think.   There has been a change, a very frightening change.  More than anyone, George W. Bush's brother should comprehend this difference.

So there's a reason we're becoming much more conservative.  The compromises for which little brother Jeb yearns have moved the country, sometimes slower than faster, but always in the same direction-left, left and left. 

There is a time for every purpose under heaven, and the time for compromise has passed.