Markos Moulitsas, the left wing netroots leader and uber blogger, opines on the the meeting by top Conservative this week in Virginia. I could not agree with his sentiments more.

I attended one of these for our side in early 2005, and the experience was so miserable that it ended up being a major inspiration for Crashing the Gate. It was full of the same progressive “leaders” who had gotten us into our predicament, and their solutions were the same bullshit that had gotten us in the mess in the first place. So I left that retreat even more motivated to wage war against our party’s political and issue-group establishment. Our victories in recent years have come, in large part, from our ability to bypass that crowd.

Those early tensions are mostly erased, as a new balance has been struck by issue groups more and more aware of the need to be part of a holistic progressive movement, rather than focus obsessively and divisively on their own single pet cause. It really is night and day. But that didn’t come out of that conference. And it certainly wasn’t billed as a way to generate a new grassroots movement. The notion of having a bunch of top-down movement leaders create a new “national grassroots” operation by fiat from up and above, by the same jokers who created the mess the GOP is currently in, is pretty laughable.

Unless our side chooses better leadership, which they do not seem willing to do, we will continue to lose the battle for elections, ideas, and this country.

UPDATE! It looks like one of our founders here at Save the GOP is up to something.