As Yellowjacket foreshadowed with his post the other day, Senator Tom Coburn did indeed publicly offer his views on what went wrong and how we can fix it in an article in Forbes Magazine. Some folks might not like the conciliatory gesture Dr. Coburn makes with his title of “Hands Across The Aisle”, but that is just the man’s style. Senator Coburn is a fighter and when it comes time to go to war with the left side of the Senate he is the first one over the barricades.

Conservatives find the charge that they have been suddenly expelled from American political life surreal because we have been a minority within the majority, then a minority within the minority, since 1996. Conservatives have been consciously marginalized ever since the new Republican majority decided inconvenient promises like term limits were no longer necessary now that the “good guys” were in charge. And, as far back as 1997, Republican leaders initiated the Republican leadership policy of referring to conservatives as “you conservatives”–a troublesome band best kept outside of the Republican machinery that was busy doing important work like constructing the K Street Project.

A collection of some conservative (and not so conservative) pundits led by Jim Manzi (an editor at NRO) has started a multi-article dialogue about the future of the both the GOP and conservatism itself over at Slate. While you probably won’t agree with some of what is being said it is worth checking out if only to see what is being opined by other members of the rightwing coalition.

The American Thinker has a pretty good piece by Geoffrey P. Hunt that lays out the founding principles of the American Thinker as a reminder of what we are striving for. I don’t agree with everything in this creed, but it is worth a read nevertheless.

Of course there were also the pre-election discussions that were taking place on the Next Right, here, though I thought the most important post over there was this by Jon Henke: Fix the movement, fix the party. I completely disagree with Henke’s solution (and analysis for that matter), the party is not an “empty vessel”, nor is the conservative movement bereft of new ideas and intellectual vigor. Running an ideologically empty vessel like John McCain results in exactly the type of thing we are all trying to avoid.

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit though is too busy celebrating his new found freedom to care about anything else at the moment and good for him. Conservatives have needed a little more freedom after these last eight years of hell.