"Enough?" Amen.

I doubt David Frum and I would ever agree on much.  He is a self-described conservative Republican, a one-time volunteer for Ronald Reagan, a speechwriter for our most recent President Bush.  But we do agree on his scathing assessment of Rush Limbaugh and his Svengali-like hold on the Grand Old Party, as outlined in Frum's recent Newsweek cover story.  Frum describes Limbaugh as an "ego-driven" man who will never let the best interests of the party, much less the nation, interfere with the best interests of Rush.

Frum, who's taken some incoming rounds from his fellow conservatives for daring to express the apostate view that the party must adapt and evolve, writes of the emails he gets when he dares criticize the all-knowing Mr. Limbaugh.

"Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don't agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There's the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don't care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That's not the language of politics. It's the language of a cult."

Which is pretty much what I've been getting at in various and sundry columns about the party in recent years.  It frequently seems less a polticial entity than a coterie of true believers where ideological discipline is rigidly enforced and questions are not allowed.  And that way lies irrelevance.