A play on the famous William Buckley quote: "Standing athwart history yelling stop." Buckley's "history" implied a Burkean conservatism a legitimate program you could debate with, because it contained ideas (a theoretical apparatus, an independent mindset, a suggestion that rather than letting "history" run roughshod it should be considered and debated etc.), "Washington Liberals" implies nothing really. [Other than perhaps a particularly cynical Rovian Republicanism.]
On a related note, Brookhiser had an Wall Street Journal editorial calling for the return to William Buckley and the way his conservative ideas were in dialogue with history... But Buckley, as Brookhiser notes, allowed thought through history at every turn. He was thinking through, not just reacting.
This seems to be the major difficulty of the current Republican party and its intellectual apparatus:
It is simultaneously resting on its laurels (as it does in evoking this slogan) and panicking (as the content of the slogan implies).
I don't think 2006 and 2008 were as bad as they seem for Republicans, but I think they need to get past the paradox that they are trapped in and that seems encapsulated in this ad.
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