With the Thrilla from Wasilla a fading memory; with their laissez-faire, free-market Reaganomics under seige by current events and with their Southern Strategy in tatters, conservatives are in desparate need of something they can point to and rally around.

Well now that New York City has been Disneyfied thanks to Rudy Giuliani, there's always Detroit, grand symbol of the failures of the 60s War on Poverty and affirmative action with the added bonus of the United Auto Workers. Michael Scherer at Swampland directs us to Matt Labash's latest Weekly Standard piece.

Somewhere along the way, Detroit became our national ashtray, a safe place for everyone to stub out the butt of their jokes. This was never more evident than at the recent congressional hearings, featuring the heads of the Big Three automakers, now more often called the Detroit Three, as that sounds more synonymous with failure. Yes, they have been feckless and tone-deaf in the past, and now look like stalkers trying to make people love them with desperation moves such as Ford breaking the "Taurus" name out of mothballs, or Chrysler steering a herd of cattle through downtown Detroit for an auto show (some of the longhorns started humping each other in front of reporters, giving new meaning to the "Dodge Ram," which they were intended to advertise).

As Hitchens once wrote in a gentle rebuke to something P.J. O'Rourke had penned, "That's quite funny, but it's not funny enough."