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I don't have any links or anything, but Keith Olbermann was reporting last night that there are some Conservatives who have accused George F. Will of drinking the Obama kool-aid, because he was critical of the McCain/Palin ticket.  Seriously.  They'll take a shot at ANYONE if they so much as suggest McCain/Palin might lose.  

The Republican party is going to be an empty shell by this time next month.

It wont even need help imploding by that stage.

Which means moving onto the next stage: sinking the Good Ship Obama.

The National Review is in the middle of a civil war.

Rats are abandoning ship with increasing regularity.

Whats scary is that it has taken Michelle Malkin to point this out to people.

How the lost election will be spun (via Democratic Strategist):

Coming after an intensely fought election campaign with a compelling — indeed mediagenic, rock- star cultural conservative like Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, a strong Obama victory would imply:

That most Americans don't actually share cultural conservative's vision of themselves as "the real America," opposed by only a minority of educated elites.That most Americans don't share the view that Obama and Democrats are essentially un-American and unpatriotic.

That most Americans do, in fact, believe that it was eight years of Republican pro-free market policies that created the current economic crisis.

This, conservatives simply cannot accept. As a result, in the last few days, we have seen the beginnings of the new conservative narrative start to emerge from Steve Schmidt's Rovian media operation within the McCain campaign. The key elements of this new narrative are as follows:

1. That Barack Obama is not only actually a secret radical/terrorist sympathizer but that there has been a vast and concerted conspiracy by "the mainstream media filter" to hide this truth from voters.

2. That leading Dems including Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reed are the primary culprits in the current financial crisis

3. That primarily Black "goons and hooligans" are going to steal the election.

Each of these new tropes has been launched by one or more of the major McCain campaign ads in the last few days and each is widely repeated and reinforced by extensive viral e-mail campaigns.

When McCain finally felt obligated to speak up and disagree with these distortions last Friday he was roundly booed by his own supporters – and it will only get worse after the election. If McCain does not rigidly stick to the new conservative script that Steve Schmidt has handed him to read and he loses the election, the conservatives – including Sarah – "et tu, Brutus" - Palin - will turn on him like wild hyenas.

If you think Democrats have been mean to McCain this year, just wait until you hear the conservatives rip him apart after the election. They will call him a "weakling," "a bumbling fool" and a "senile, doddering old man who let an easy victory escape him." "After all," they will add knowingly, "he was never really a true conservative to start with." This "the loss was all McCain's fault" rationalization will actually provide the fourth and final element of the new conservative narrative.

This may seem cruel, but conservatives really have little choice except to explain the election in this way because a key part of their world view is an unrelenting insistence that politics is a simple morality play of good vs. evil — with themselves invariably in the heroes' role. In this storyline Conservatives are always basically right and always essentially pure – they do not make fundamental mistakes or display major moral and ethical failings (if an individual conservative does any of these things, it simply proves that he or she was not actually a "real" conservative to begin with).

She is a woman so it is funny to ironically criticize her appearance.

I just hate her for inflicting the HuffPo on the internet.

Or Arianna Huffington is reverting to her socialite gossip roots.

Along with the rest of the media.

Clearly it will be due to the machinations of the radical Left and their Illuminati Weatherman agents, doing it to Palin in her sleep.

If Arianna Huffington were a TRUE freethinker, she'd be investigating this Illuminati Org ACORN Chart instead of wasting time on such trivial issues:

Obama is now not gay at all, but the next Bill Clinton.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1076695/Obama-hit-affair-smears-following-claims-attractive-aide-banned-wife.html

I felt it managed to keep itself at the top regardless of stickiness, and since every day brings new hilarity, it needeth not teh stick.

More on Obama and his gaylord butt buddy poet pal who is gay and into the homo sex.

http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/275493.php

So then, Cain, would you say that the 'altruistic' religious memes that were propagated by Alexander the Great " I'ma conquer your nation, but worship however you want" created an environment that made it less difficult for Christianity's "There is Only One True Religion" to take advantage of these less selfish memplexes?

I'm also thinking about how this was abused by the Apostle Paul in reference to "Agnostos Theos" or the Unknown God worshiped by the Greeks.

22Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

'Unknown God' seems like a pretty altruistic meme, Pauls memes were surely not altruistic.

It seems likely.  I know both Persia and Rome tended to be very flexible on religion, during large periods of their history.  Alexander actually took his policies from Cyrus the Great (who famously allowed the Jews to worship their own religion in the Bible) and thus religious tolerance spread from the boundaries of Rome to the border of India.  Ironically, the same territory where Christianity and Islam managed to entrench themselves so well.

However, I am wondering more how this works on the individual person level.  Does individual-selection hold true for memes under most circumstances, or is it more complex, and thus more open to the benefits of competition cooperation, damnit?  That is where I am uncertain.

That was what I meant about select conditions.  I was thinking martyrdom, but yes things along that line too.

However, that would also undermine the Dawkins conception of memes and evolution, where the entire purpose is centered around the individual, and not the group.

Which is why I asked the question.

Dennett focused more on a "meme's-eye view".  The meme doesn't care if the host lives or dies, as long as the meme gets passed on. And of course, the memeplex of organized religion is, by nature, all about group dynamics.  Memes are passed along in very structured ways: rituals, worship services, prayers, holy books, etc. There are certain people ("holy men") who have more control over memes than anyone else, but they always need others to help them spread the memes.

I had never heard anything about memes being centered around individuals (but I haven't read much Dawkins).  Maybe you should explain it a little more because I'm not understanding it.

Here is a section from The Selfish Gene that may help explain what I mean more:

Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entities us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals.

[...]

These stories are simply intended as illustrations of what I mean by altruistic and selfish behaviour at the level of individuals. This book will show how both individual selfishness and individual altruism are explained by the fundamental law that I am calling gene selfishness. But first I must deal with a particular erroneous explanation for altruism, because it is widely known, and even widely taught in schools.

This explanation is based on the misconception that I have already mentioned, that living creatures evolve to do things 'for the good of the species' or 'for the good of the group'. It is easy to see how this idea got its start in biology. Much of an animal's life is devoted to reproduction, and most of the acts of altruistic self-sacrifice that are observed in nature are performed by parents towards their young. 'Perpetuation of the species' is a common euphemism for reproduction, and it is undeniably a consequence of reproduction. It requires only a slight over-stretching of logic to deduce that the 'function' of reproduction is 'to' perpetuate the species. From this it is but a further short false step to conclude that animals will in general behave in such a way as to favour the perpetuation of the species. Altruism towards fellow members of the species seems to follow.

This line of thought can be put into vaguely Darwinian terms. Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the 'fittest'. But are we talking about the fittest individuals, the fittest races, the fittest species, or what.' For some purposes this does not greatly matter, but when we are talking about altruism it is obviously crucial. If it is species that are competing in what Darwin called the struggle for existence, the individual seems best regarded as a pawn in the game, to be sacrified when the greater interest of the species as a whole requires it. To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, maybe less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world
becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of 'group selection', long assumed to be
true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory, brought out into the open in a famous book by V. C. Wynne-Edwards, and popularized by Robert Ardrey in The Social Contract. The orthodox alternative is normally called 'individual selection', although I personally prefer to speak of gene selection.

The quick answer of the 'individual selectionist' to the argument just put might go something like this. Even in the group of altruists, there will almost certainly be a dissenting minority who refuse to make any sacrifice. If there is just one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the rest, then he, by definition, is more likely than they are to survive and have children. Each of these children will tend to inherit his selfish traits. After several generations of this natural selection, the 'altruistic group' will be over-run by selfish individuals, and will be indistinguishable from the selfish group. Even if we grant the improbable chance existence initially of pure altruistic groups without any rebels, it is very difficult to see what is to stop selfish individuals migrating in from neighbouring selfish groups, and, by inter-marriage, contaminating the purity of the altruistic groups.

The individual-selectionist would admit that groups do indeed die out, and that whether or not a group goes extinct may be influenced by the behaviour of the individuals in that group. He might even admit that if only the individuals in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restraining their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group. How many times must this have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain? But group extinction is a slow process compared with the rapid cut and thrust of individual competition. Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists. The citizens of Britain may or may not be blessed with foresight, but evolution is blind to the future.

Although the group-selection theory now commands litte support within the ranks of those professional biologists who understand evolution, it does have great intuitive appeal.

Applying the same logic to memes, it would seem that altruistic memes would only really prosper under the controlled conditions of extermination of dissenting memes - a very early and primitive form of social engineering.

Edit: I fully accept I may be stretching the exact evolutionary model here to somewhere it does not quite fit. 

True.  The first book is 527 pages long, on my screen.

And that is A4 size pages.

"Oh baby, bond with that benzine ring.  Oh yeah, thats right, you like your reactions exothermic, don't you..."