Tabin, three cheers. You’re dead right. “Fiscal conservative” is as much a code as anything else used to cabin off right from left with a bad conscience. It stinks, I think, as bad as a certain smell rising from the corpse of Joe Lieberman. That corpse, of course, will walk again, as it should; but Pat Buchanan is not just whistlin’ Dixie when he lambastes the Lieb’s neocon hagiographers.

The last laugh is that actual fiscal conservatism is virtually a dead letter. The rabbit hole we’ve tumbled down has, as Sam Elliot put it in The Big Lebowski, “no bottom.” The illness that has gripped American spendiness is terminal, until further notice — in the household as well as the federal purse. We might have to tear down the GOP — at least, for a laugh, as it’s usually done, in primary season — in order to tear down entitlement spending. This is one of those fine trades for which we have won compassion and security. It’s bosh and we know it is. But who will step into the breach? Mike Pence?