As dusk falls

As I've said before, people probably don't check in with a blog called Late in the Day looking for big doses of sunshine and confidence about the future.

I would like to have been able to give a blog about the current cultural, economic, political and geostrategic state of Western civilization a different name, maybe something a little cute or post-ironic, but I wanted to do those finding their way here in the midst of surfing the service of letting them know what the site's understanding of our current juncture is.

And it never gets any better. There, I said it.

Is this country full of wholesome, principled, energetic, God-fearing, productive, caring people? Clearly; we all know such beings, and there are even some in fields where they are admittedly a rarity. Politics comes to mind.

For the most part, such people tend to take care of their lives and work and leave ideology to others, though. Their thinking, it seems to me, is that their principles are best asserted in this world by example. There's also the fact that the pace of modern life just plain keeps upright, productive folks rather busy.

A few do get involved on the level of trying to influence our culture. They generally get rewarded with vitriol, snark and hate mail for their efforts.

So here we are, not even to Super Tuesday yet, and the GOP presidential candidate field has basically narrowed to three. (Yes, there will be four onstage at the next debate, but Paul - well, we've been over what he's about many times.) One is a decent family man by all accounts, with one devoted and fine wife to his name, as well as four robust and decent sons. He also happens to be the Establishment / Reasonable Gentleman / RINO / starched-shirt-corporatespeak candidate of this election cycle, the kind that Republicans routinely nominate, sometimes to get elected and sometimes to be defeated. Another is a principled conservative, with probably the fewest departures from conservatism in his record of any Republicans that have run this time. He is also a deeply religious family man, married to his first wife. He also seems to be past the peak of his modest surge. Then there's Newt.

He's certainly having an eventful day, isn't he? Perry drops out and endorses him. His second ex-wife's ABC interview will air after tonight's debate, and even if there are no new bombshells, to have her on video recounting what a heartless, hypocritical, emotionally detached man he has been in at least one period of his life is going to be damaging.

Let's go ahead and review the flaws and lapses in judgement we know about in addition to such behavior as asking his wife to tolerate his affair. There's the public whining about being placed in the back of the plane on the trip with Bill Clinton. There's the environmentalist TV commercial in which he sits on a bench with Nancy Pelosi. There's his support for Scozzafava over Hoffman in the upstate New York congressional election. There's his dissing of Paul Ryan's tax-and-entitlement plan on Sunday morning television. There's his support for ethanol subsidies.

And then there are the instances when he thunderously champions conservative principles like no one else. There's no way that's not extremely valuable - urgently needed - at this moment.

I'm well aware that the truism "reality demands choosing between available choices, not pretending or wishing that other choices were available" is so important that its status as a cliche must be overlooked. That doesn't make it any less hard to really let in.

It's harder than ever to defend conservatism, not because it's not defensible, but because, between horrible spokespeople for it (Newt) and less-than-effective spokespeople for it (Santorum, Perry, Bachmann, Cain), it gets drowned out by a mainstream media that is in the tank for radical socialism and that has no problem with moral relativism (unless it's practiced in a hypocritical way by a conservative spokesperson).

We're making the path to re-election for the worst and most radical president in U.S. history easy. While it's understandable that the array of possible contenders most of us really wanted to see - Daniels, Christie, Bolton, Rubio - declined to run because of the inevitable damage one sustains in the intra-party winnowing process, the result is that those who would take on the most damage, because of their flaws, are the ones left standing.

It's just a real drag to be this disspirited this early in an election year. It's a battlefield with no heroes.