Conservatives have a Hamlet question this week. Whether to 'tis nobler in the mind to back President Obama as commander-in-chief, right or wrong. Or to take arm against a sea of troubles and defeat the president on his Syria war resolution.

Or, perchance to dream that, at this point, what difference does it make?

Either way, this nation desperately needs to discredit utterly the political faith of its liberal ruling class by November 2016. Because until that happens, America is stuck in an authoritarian administrative time warp of foreign policy irrelevance and domestic policy train wrecks.

Here's how we would know that liberalism were utterly discredited. We would see cable comedians like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert make their bones by sneering at liberal numskulls instead of at conservative numskulls as they do now, because that's where the ratings would force them.

Conservatives used to think that liberals had already been discredited by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. We were wrong, and here's why.

There's a theory about war that any real war takes 30 years to sort out. That's because the loser typically needs to sacrifice two generations of young men on the battlefield before it gets the message. See Germany 1618-48; France, 1789-1815; Germany, 1914-45.

Stephen Moore's recent piece reporting that youth and women and minorities are hardest hit by Obamanomics tells us that liberal governance is in the middle of wiping out the second generation of Democratic faithful in 40 years. The first wipeout, remember, was the stagflation of the 1970s that Reagan cured in the 1980s.

Back in the late 1970s liberals were saying that the nation was ungovernable. How else to account for the stagflation? Liberal President Carter knew what needed to be done, but he just didn't have the power to overrule Congress. Now we have Sam Tanenhaus mourning that Obama is stuck with a "Hands-tied Presidency." Nobody's fault, of course. Just the reality of politics in America.


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