The anti-Bush/DeLay conservative underground continues to go public. The latest dissident to follow in the footsteps of David Brooks, David Frum, Bruce Bartlett and many others is Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard, who
published a scathing New York Times op-ed about the state of conservatism on Saturday:

Young conservatives in particular will react to the new, post-DeLay reality in different ways. I know I have. First, looking at your party’s troubles, you see perverse confirmation of conservatism’s animating idea: that as the sphere of public decision-making expands, so do the opportunities for graft and wrongdoing. Next you note, with sadness, that while political power helped bring about some achievements – welfare reform, pro-growth tax cuts, an assertive, moralistic foreign policy – it may have also exhausted conservatism’s fighting spirit, lowered the movement’s intellectual standards and replaced a healthy independence with partisan water-carrying.

But then you take solace in the idea that the Republican Party has once again bested the Democrats, who after all took 40 years to sprout the warts of power.

Who will go public next?