As President Bush prepares to deliver the last State of the Union address of his presidency this evening, two veteran Republican speechwriters have already delivered their own post-mortems on the Republican Party.

The elephant is dead, say Mike Gerson and Peggy Noonan. Who killed it?

In the January 28 issue of Newsweek magazine, former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson fingers an unlikely suspect: austerity. According to him, the GOP is facing disaster in November not because President Bush blundered –- or manipulated -– the country into an unnecessary war; not because his administration resorted to torture and rode roughshod over civil liberties; not because his administration has been characterized by cronyism and incompetence; not because Mr. Bush tried to usurp states’ rights by pushing a federal marriage amendment to the Constitution; not because Mr. Bush was responsible for the biggest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson; and not because he did nothing while congressional Republicans went hog-wild in voting themselves disgraceful pork-barrel spending projects.

No, according to Mr. Gerson, the GOP is doomed because it reacted parsimoniously to Hurricane Katrina. Republicans, he says, didn’t spend enough to help the victims, and the American people recoiled in horror from such mean-spirited penny-pinching.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan issued her own coroner’s report in the January 25 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Her finding: “George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, on the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.”

Ms. Noonan’s is the more accurate finding. She’s not kidding herself in print. Gerson, in contrast, is not only self-deluded, he has the gall to say that those in the Republican Party who want to return to what used to be its fundamental principles –- such as limited government, free markets and individual freedom –- are not true conservatives, but libertarians. He then trots out the late Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual giants of 20th Century American conservatism, to bolster his point. He quotes Kirk condemning libertarianism as “an ideology of universal selfishness.”

That’s a shabby trick that won’t work on anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with Russell Kirk’s writings. (In my case, I knew him personally.) It’s true that Dr. Kirk was sharply critical of libertarianism. But that doesn’t mean that he would have approved of the brand of big government conservatism being peddled by Mr. Gerson. We are, after all, talking about the same Russell Kirk who, some quarter-century ago, defined a conservative in these terms: “Typically, such a person holds strictly by the Constitution, maintaining that it should be strictly interpreted; he endeavors to oppose the drift toward political centralization; he dislikes organizations on the grand scale, in government, in business and industry, in organized labor; he is a defender of private property; he resents the heavy increase of taxation and many of ‘transfer payments’ of the welfare state …” Kirk, in short, would have viewed any kind of big government conservatism as an oxymoron.

It doesn’t much matter what President Bush says tonight. He’s already history, along with the Republican Party that he has managed to immolate. The question now is whether a phoenix will arise from the ashes. If so, what kind of bird will it be?