The right-wing's reaction to Al Gore's winning The Nobel Peace prize on Friday was pathetic if somewhat predictable. The gist of their beef was that awarding it to him was politically motivated and that there were people far more worthy than he; according to John McCain, the Burmese monks should have gotten it, Fox News did their best to make the case for General Petraeus and National Review Online said Gore should share it with "well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden."

But this is much more than a case of sour grapes. Paul Krugman makes a keen observation about the root of what he calls the right's Gore Derangement Syndrome in his column today:

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

This refusal to concede that Democrats are right on the issues that matter most to Americans extends to the right-wing's delusion about their losses in 2006. They'd like to think that it was merely a function of discontent with Iraq, the president and Republican corruption; the last thing they want to admit is that the American people have concluded that the Democratic Party is simply right and the Republican Party is simply wrong because they would then have to admit that conservatism as a governing philosophy is a failure. But that's exactly what John Boehner all but admitted yesterday on Fox News Sunday when he laid out his strategy for winning back the House.

HUME: What is your plan to restore your party to the majority?

BOEHNER: I think we've got to be the party of solutions. The American people don't care who's in charge of congress. I think they're tired of all the partisan bickering and all the noise here and they want solutions. And I think you'll see our party come forward with solutions on healthcare, and how do we get high quality health insurance to all Americans, how do we insure that they have good access to healthcare, what's our answer to global climate change, how do we get to energy independence? I think we as a political party need to provide solutions to those concerns that Americans have, but solutions built on Republican principles.

Let operation co-opt Democratic issues begin.

Certainly, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we should be flattered indeed. Perhaps the Republican leadership isn't as dumb as they look. They seem to finally have realized that the only chance their party has to avoid being relegated to electoral irrelevance is to engage on the mainstream issues people care about; in other words look and sound like Democrats.

Unfortunately for Boehner, the reason this strategy is doomed before it's begun is that an admission that Democrats are on the right side of the issues and of history is not something the right-wing will ever abide.