Conservative Rule #1: Don't take voting advice from Democrats.

The very first thing that any would-be conservative should learn about the contemporary Democratic Party is to never, under any circumstances whatsoever, take voting advice from it. The Democratic Party invariably offers up shamelessly self-serving electoral advice to conservatives and Republicans. Why would any conservative seriously consider voting advice from a political party that compares conservatives to Nazis or psychopaths on a daily basis?

So the big important electoral advice any conservative is likely to get from their fair-weather liberal friends this year is a nice lecture about how great and fun and character-building it would be for Republicans to lose everything. The Democrats are just begging for the chance to totally screw-over and destroy their own party by winning back Congress next week. What better way for a conservative to show a principled stand for conservative government than by electing as many welfare statists as he or she can?

A nice example of this type of propagandizing comes from a blog I had considered to be fairly rational until now and its cringingly obsequious "Eight reasons not to vote for the Republicans".

The post's reason 1 is the most ridiculous: Not much is really at stake. Of course a lot is at stake! We're talking about control of a branch of government here, not the Mickey Mouse club. Yes, it's true that there are currently no open positions on the Supreme Couty, but a Republican majority in the Senate also means a better chance of conservative nominees being confirmed in all of the lesser positions of government as well. You can also be sure that a Democratic congress would be eager to start cutting off funding for American troops in Iraq, assuming that it doesn't launch a two-year impeachment drive against the President first.

Reason 2 is actually a great reason to vote for Republicans. Remember 1992? Does any conservative in his or her right mind want another 1992?

Reason 3 is another great reason to vote Republican: Democrat Nancy Pelosi will be such an inept Speaker of the House that she's almost certain to totally screw things up by 2008.

Reason 4 is a little more subtle than the others. Here the argument is that the Republicans have shamelessly gerrymandered so many Congressional districts that they have become corrupt and insulated from their voting base of support. I'm willing to conceed that conservative or Republican voters might judge themselves to be "anti-gerrymander" voters first and foremost this year. One slight caveat to keep in mind is that Democrats have gerrymandered districts in both Republican and Democratic-leaning states, so some anti-gerrymander voters would have to vote Republican against a Democratic incumbent to "decline to participate in this rigged process."

Reason 5 goes back to the phoney-baloney again. Here the post suggests that:

Losing control of one or (preferably) both houses will provide an excellent moment of clarity. This will be the point at which rising figures in the Party can safely call for a new approach and new policies, citing the demonstrated outcome of the current approach and current policies.

A "new approach and new policies" sounds like a euphemism for "cutting and running" from Iraq. Taken at face value, this reason is meaningless. Of course candidates can safely call for a new approach and new policies. It happens all the time. Remember 1988?

Reason 6 is pure liberal wish fulfillment:

The architects of the current Party hegemony need to be fully discredited. Rove and company have been at the forefront of an astonishingly cynical Party strategy. Does it not pain you to hear the plainly idiotic slogans of this bunch – Democrats will lose the war on terror (you mean we're winning?), your taxes will go up, and your son will be gang pressed into the Gay Mafia. It's sad when a Party has no real strategy beyond caricaturing its opponents. Telling, too.

This is the argument (most notoriously advanced by Andrew Sullivan nowadays) that Democrats are just Republicans who care a bit more about the poor and minorities and women, and that the only reason why American politics isn't one big happy song is that evil "Rove and company" (who are so self-evidently evil that they should just fall on their swords right now).

Reason 7 boils down to making the elections a referendum on Iraq. Also, notice how reason 7 nicely dovetails with the suspicious euphemism of reason 5 ("new approach and new policies")while also blantantly contradicting reason 1 ("not much is really at stake"). Reason 7 is obviously the key message of this whole exercise: that Democrats will really stick it to President Bush over Iraq if they ever get their hands on real power again. But hey, conservatives just might relish a chance to vote for two years of partisan warfare waged by a Democratic party that's been howling for REVENGE against President Bush since November 2000 .

Finally, the anticlimactic reason 8 goes back to the argument that losing builds party character, although in reality losing really just builds losers. There is a minor point for conservatives to notice here: making a stand on the moral high ground of conservative principles will take some of the sting out of the amazing non-stop Democratic-Party triumphalism that will be all over the mainstream media if the Democrats recapture Congress.