Subterranean windowless “ballrooms” are the bane of contemporary political confabs, but the setting for the National Review Institute’s summit this past weekend, in the lower basement level of the Omni Shoreham in Washington, seemed fitting. After all, the rhetoric coming from Republicans has been increasingly bunkerish: President Barack Obama, the line goes, is not just out to destroy the American free enterprise system—that was the line for the first term. Now he’s out to destroy the Republican Party itself—or rather, to render it gradually extinct, a la the Whig fadeout of the mid–19th century. So we had House Speaker John Boehner last week telling the Ripon Society (apparently, it still exists) that Obama wanted to “annihilate” the GOP. And the National Review summit kicked into gear with Paul Ryan on Saturday morning repeating the threat, in somewhat milder terms: Obama, he declared, “needs to delegitimize the Republican Party—and House Republicans, in particular. He’ll try to divide us with phony emergencies and bogus deals. He’ll try to get us to fight with each other—to question each other’s motives—so we don’t challenge him.” The message got through to the several hundred disconsolate attendees. One, an accountant from New Jersey by the name of Tony (“not Soprano”) told me that he saw Obama’s goal being to “make [Republicans] irrelevant. That’s how he’s going to get rid of [them].” And how would he encourage that irrelevance? “By lying. Like he’s been doing for four years.”