Peter Schweizer thinks Barack Obama running for president as a victim is the ultimate and supreme expression of the left’s culture of complaint.

We now are down to two presidential candidates. One went to the Ivy League and Harvard Law School as a young man. The other spent years of his youth in a Vietnam Prisoner of War camp and suffered lifelong injuries. Guess which one whines more about his hardships?

Jimmy Carter’s Sweater: All Ready For New User

NBC:

Williams: Is it going to be tough to run with an incumbent party for the White House, given this economic backdrop?

McCain: I—I think it’s—it’s tough. But I think the American didn’t, people didn’t get to know me yesterday. They know me. They know that I have fought for restraining spending, which Senator Obama has been a big part of, with earmarking (UNINTEL) projects. They know that I have been a strong fiscal conservative, and they know I understand the challenges that they face.

They need a little break from—from their gasoline taxes, and they—and they know that—we’ve got to get spending under control. And we’ve got to become independent of foreign oil. Sen. Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third terms. It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second. (LAUGHTER)

Having used his bully pulpit on AM Radio to persuade Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in several of the democrat primaries, a strategic political move which he has dubbed “Operation Chaos,” Rush Limbaugh, during his radio program yesterday, paused from mocking the Mainstream media, to hint that he may continue his Operation Chaos strategy in the general election, advising Republicans to crossover again to vote for John McCain.

Ben Smith reports, but fails to recognize or understand, that Hillary Clinton has managed to identify the United States’ key foreign policy aim: the destruction of the OPEC oil cartel, which represents a monstrous and increasingly burdensome tax upon the economies of the West levied by a collection of backward dictatorships and parasitical Third World regimes. The incomprehensibly vast wealth transfers effectuated by this artificial manipulation of the pricing of a basic world commodity have not produced the enlightenment and content prosperity of its beneficiaries, but has instead emboldened them to promote religious intolerance and hostility toward the West, while enabling them to fund the arming and training of a new Order of Assassins, a series of militant bands of murderous fanatics bent on suicidal violence aimed at innocent victims in Middle Eastern countries and South East Asia as well as Europe and the United States.

Destroy OPEC, and you cut the Gordian Knot. You eliminate Terrorism at its source by removing its funding. You also simultaneously revitalize the economies of every country in the entire productive world by extracting a major parasite that has been feeding upon its vitals.

Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious “speculators,” and made that—along with her push for a gas tax holiday—central to her closing message in Indiana.

It’s a potent message, like the attack on “Wall Street money brokers,” with deep roots in American politics. It’s also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.

Kiss Obama goodbye, lefties. Hillary is going to run on this one, and he will be toast.

And John McCain had better move rapidly to adopt the same policy, or he could also be in deep trouble.

The most striking image is just a little over a second long, the blast of an IED beginning to impact two soldiers in American battle dress.

Campaign strategists of the democrat party are clearly the kind of people who see nothing wrong in using the image of a successful enemy attack on US forces for partisan political advantage.

It would never occur to these people that the image (taken from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which can be found around 1:35 into the trailer*) they are using is exploiting the pain and suffering (and possibly the deaths) of their fellow citizens incurred in the course of defending them.

• Hat tip to LGF Commenter MacGregor

This precise image could just as easily appear in an al Qaeda propaganda video accompanied by howls of Allahu Akbar!

0: 35 video

The cowards will certainly pull this one when the storm of outrage breaks over their heads, so here’s a link to a copy on YouTube.

Maybe it’s time to change the symbol of the democrat party from the jackass to something even more appropriate:

This anti-Obama ad was produced by the North Carolina GOP. (Good for them!)

0:40 video

And, would you believe this?

John McCain and (the now McCain-ite) Republican National Committee have called upon those tarheels to withdraw the ad, calling it “offensive,” “inappropriate,” and not “respectful.”

P.J. O’Rourke visits an aircraft carrier and becomes a fan of John McCain’s.

Some say John McCain’s character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do—voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer’s or a half gallon of Dewar’s. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

Some people say John McCain isn’t conservative enough. But there’s more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it’s full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck you’re sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.

McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government is, and packed with a madding crowd. It requires organization, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a doll house of ideology. It is not a toy bunny serving imaginary sweets at a make-believe political tea party. The captain commands, but his whims do not. He answers to the nation.

And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can’t. Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear color-coded T-shirts—yellow for flight-directing, purple for fueling, blue for chocking and tying-down, red for weapon-loading, brown for I-know-not-what, and so on. These people can’t hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can’t do that. Really, they communicate by “training telepathy.” They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.

These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only 19 or 20. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about 24. “These are the same kids,” a chief petty officer said, “who, back on land, have their hats bumped to one side and their pants around their knees, hanging out on corners. And here they’re in charge of $35 million airplanes.”

The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an arresting cable breaks—and they do—half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there’s no ejection seat for the flight deck crew. While we were on the Theodore Roosevelt a memorial service was held for a crew member who had been swept overboard. Would there have been an admiral and a captain of an aircraft carrier and hundreds of the bravest Americans at a memorial service for you when you were 20?

Supposedly the “youth vote” is all for Obama. But it’s John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. Supposedly the “women’s vote” is . . . well, let’s not go too far with this. I can speak to John’s honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I’m not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he’d been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary’s attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill’s life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the “women’s vote.”

These would have been interesting subjects to discuss with the Theodore Roosevelt shipmates, but time was up.

Back on the COD you’re buckled in and told to brace as if for a crash. Whereupon there is a crash. The catapult sends you squashed against your flight harness. And just when you think that everything inside your body is going to blow out your nose and navel, it’s over. You’re in steady, level flight.

A strange flight it is—from the hard and fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters—who, put together, don’t have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick—presume to run for president of the United States. They’re not just running against the hero John McCain, they’re running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

I think PJ is getting a bit overenthusiastic about McCain, but he’s right enough on Hillary and Obama.

0:31 video

Hillary’s original and Obama’s response link

Saturday Night Live parody link
—————————————————————
But Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm provides the definitive, last word on Hillary’s 3AM ad.

The Republican Party is about to nominate a man whose past loyalty to the GOP, Conservatism, and the current Republican Administration obviously leaves a great deal to be desired.

Back in 2001, John McCain denied having any reasons for, or intentions of, leaving the Republican Party.” Last year, his spokesman told Power Line that there was no truth in stories that John McCain had considered leaving the GOP.

But former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, currently out promoting a new book, has just leaked his own recollections of private democrat party negotiations with McCain.

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a senior adviser for former President Bill Clinton and current adviser to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton, at one point McCain was going to leave the Republican Party and caucus with Senate Democrats.

“And although he doesn’t want to talk to reporters about it now, there was a time and I was privy to some of those who were involved, did conduct negotiations through third parties about whether or not he would leave the Republican Party and become an independent more or less aligned in the Senate with the Democrats,” said Blumenthal on April 1. Blumenthal did not say when those negotiations took place.

Of course, this revelation is not completely new

A story dated 3/28/07 from the Hill features a similar account.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was close to leaving the Republican Party in 2001, weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent, according to former Democratic lawmakers who say they were involved in the discussions.

In interviews with The Hill this month, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) said there were nearly two months of talks with the maverick lawmaker following an approach by John Weaver, McCain’s chief political strategist.

Democrats had contacted Jeffords and then-Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) in the early months of 2001 about switching parties, but in McCain’s case, they said, it was McCain’s top strategist who came to them.

Democrats are really going to hate this extremely effective McCain campaign ad.

12:02 video

Some of us thought that the Obama video was pretty weird, but that was before we saw this McCain Girls 2:34 video. Wow!

Hat tip to Matt Yglesias.

Fred Barnes observes that this year the fates have been playing on John McCain’s team.

John McCain is one lucky fellow. Of course you can make your own luck, as the saying goes. That’s what McCain did with great courage to survive five-and-a-half years at the Hanoi Hilton. And he made his own luck again by advocating a surge of troops in Iraq that later proved to be successful.

In winning the Republican presidential nomination, however, McCain has mostly been just plain lucky, no thanks to his own fortitude or foresight. Conservatives inadvertently aided him by failing to line up behind a single rival. Mike Huckabee ruined Mitt Romney’s strategy by beating him in Iowa. And Rudy Giuliani helped by pulling out of New Hampshire and fading in Florida, allowing McCain to sneak ahead and win primaries in both states.

Now Democrats are boosting McCain’s chances of winning the presidency by prolonging the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. “They are eating their own,” says Dick Morris, the onetime adviser to the Clintons. The result, for the moment anyway, is that McCain is inching ahead in polls matching him against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

So long as Clinton stays in the race, the bitter divide among Democrats will widen—to McCain’s advantage. And since Clinton still has a chance of winning the nomination, she’s bound to continue her campaign at least through the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 and the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6—and probably until the verdict of Democratic super-delegates becomes clear sometime this summer.

No matter who ultimately wins the nomination, the prospects for electing a Democratic president this fall will have declined. And through no machinations of his own, McCain’s chances of winning will have improved. There’s a name for that happenstance: luck.

Read the whole thing.

THE MSM (example: New York Times) pounced when, on a recent trip to the Middle East, in Amman Jordan, Senator John McCain heretically spoke of Iran providing training and financing for al Qaeda.

Thomas Joscelyn debunks the well-known liberal meme about how it’s absolutely impossible for Shiites and Sunni to make common cause against unbelievers.

• Earlier this month, the U.S. military and the current head of Iraqi intelligence reported that Iran has been targeting al Qaeda’s enemies—not al Qaeda itself—inside Iraq. There have also been a number of reports on Iran’s support for al Qaeda in Iraq. The Kurds have routinely complained about Iran’s support for al Qaeda’s affiliate, Ansar al-Islam. For more on Ansar al-Islam’s ties to Iran, and other bad actors, see Dan Darling’s excellent primer. As Darling wrote: “Another apparent relationship exists between Ansar and radical elements of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which seeks to use Ansar as a proxy force against the Coalition in Iraq.”

• More generally, the theological differences between Iran and al Qaeda have never been a serious impediment to cooperation. For example, I wrote a lengthy essay on the topic of Iran’s cooperation with al Qaeda going back to the early 1990’s. And in a recent piece, I detailed the evidence cooperation between Iran’s chief terrorist, the late Imad Mugniyah, and al Qaeda.

• The 9-11 Commission found extensive evidence of collaboration between Iran and al Qaeda. For example, the Commission concluded (p. 61): “The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations.”

• The Clinton administration recognized the relationship between al Qaeda, Iran, and Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Here is, in part, what the Clinton administration charged in its indictment of al Qaeda following the August 1998 embassy bombings: “USAMA BIN LADEN, the defendant, and al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with representatives of the government of Iran, and its associated terrorist group Hizballah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.”

• The mainstream media, including the Washington Post itself, has reported on Iran’s ties to al Qaeda. But now a blog hosted by the Washington Post dismisses the idea that the two could collaborate.

John McCain was right the first time. He shouldn’t have taken his comment back. But this whole imbroglio shows just how much ignorance there is concerning our terrorist enemies.

I’m not crazy about McCain personally, but I recognize that all John McCain has to do is run this ad:

4:31 video

While the Republican Party also runs portions of this video (just to put things in perspective):

3:51 video

and it’s over for Obama.

(* punchline to a proposed “Why does a Republican cross the street” joke. The famous Ernest Hemingway version of the “Why Does the Chicken” joke, you see, ends with: “To die… alone… in the rain.”)

Peggy Noonan thinks the two parties these days are like two very different houses:

It’s a tale of two houses. One is dilapidated, old. Everyone in the neighborhood is used to it, and they turn away when they pass. A series of people lived in it and failed to take care of it. It’s run down, needs paint. The roof sags, squirrels run through the eaves. A haunted house! No, more boring. Just a house someone . . . let go.

But over here, a new house on a new plot. It’s rising from the mud before your eyes. It has interesting lines, a promising façade, and when people walk by they stop and look. So much bustle! Builders running in and out, the contractors fighting with each other—”You wouldn’t even have this job if it weren’t for the minority set-aside!” And everyone hates the architect, who put a port-o-potty on the lawn.

But: You can’t take your eyes off it. “Something being born, and not something dying.” Maybe it will improve the neighborhood. Maybe the owners will be nice.

Personally, I think the cops will soon be arriving in large numbers to suppress the donnybrook going on in that nice new house, and to take a significant portion of the tenants away in paddy wagons.

We Republicans?

The base is tired. Republicans feel their own kind of unease at Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Talk about wanting to stand athwart history yelling stop. They’re not in a mood to give money. Remember the phrase “broken glass Republicans?” The number of Republicans so offended, so wounded, actually, as citizens, by the Clinton years, that they’d crawl across broken glass to elect George Bush? They existed in 2004, too. Now a lot of them wouldn’t crawl across a plush weave carpet to vote for a Republican.

Not if he’s John McCain, we wouldn’t.

But Peggy has one crumb of good news about McCain. He likes Hemingway. A lot.

Who has he read besides Hemingway? (And he’s read him—he loves him to an almost scary degree.)

Maybe he’s not all bad, after all.

L. Brent Bozell III (son of the late L. Brent Bozell, Jr. and the late William F. Buckley’s nephew) explains in the Washington Post why conservatives’ support of liberal Republican candidates has always led to disaster and disillusionment.

After eight years of Clinton’s corruption, and facing the prospect of at least four more years with Al Gore at the helm, conservatives threw our support behind George W. Bush in 2000. He initially delivered by leading the charge in cutting taxes, and his political stature further increased when the nation rallied behind its commander in chief after Sept. 11, 2001. He won reelection in 2004 because conservatives stayed with him, delivering millions of volunteers committed to the defeat of Sen. John F. Kerry.

But any hopes that Bush would deliver on a conservative agenda in his second term evaporated almost immediately. We watched with growing fury as he and the GOP leadership promoted one liberal initiative after another. Finally, we openly rebelled, turning on the GOP over the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, amnesty for illegal immigrants and the Republicans’ shameless abandonment of fiscal discipline. What was once a powerful alliance between the Republican Party and grass-roots conservatives had become a political bridge to nowhere. With the GOP facing the loss of Congress in 2006, we shrugged in indifference. The movement that had “nowhere else to go” had gone.

And it has not returned.

How important are conservatives to the GOP? This year’s Republican primary debate was dominated by one question: Which candidate was most qualified to carry the flag of Ronald Reagan?

Ironically, the man who survived this intramural scrum is the one who arguably least qualifies as a Reagan conservative. He claims to be a champion of freedom but gave us McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform—which, by limiting free speech during elections, is perhaps the greatest infringement ever on the First Amendment. He claims to be a champion of U.S. sovereignty but offered us the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants the chance to become citizens; that’s amnesty, no matter how much he denies it. He claims to be a champion of the unborn but has waffled in the past, supporting federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. This year, he won the endorsement of Republicans for Choice. He claims to be a fiscal conservative who will make the Bush tax cuts permanent, but he also voted against them. These are serious issues.

Read the whole thing.

Serious, indeed.

The possibility of a raprochement between John McCain and conservatives clearly exists, but McCain seems to be choosing instead to rely on drawing upon the votes of the middle-of-the roaders. He has been surrounding himself with prominent Republican liberals, and gives no evidence of intending a serious effort to repair relations with the GOP’s conservative base.

McCain clearly believes that faced with a choice between Lady Macbeth or B. Hussein Obama and himself, conservatives will inevitably pull the lever for McCain. He’s wrong. We can also simply stay home or cast some kind of protest vote.

John McCain thinks he’s Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt.

2:05 video

I thought the contrast of Churchill’s eloquence and McCain’s feeble powers of oration and squeaky voice did not work to his advantage, and I did not buy into McCain’s expressions of humble patriotism. I think McCain has a pretty visible sense of entitlement.

Rush Limbaugh argues that conservatives in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont should vote for Hillary Clinton today.

As usual, Rush is right. It’s better to keep Hillary alive in order to keep the democrats fighting right through their convention, which may even possibly feature the traditional democrat bloodbath.

And Obama is decidedly scarier than Hillary. He is a talented demagogue of extremely unsavory ultra-left background, who lucked into an unexpected seat in the Senate courtesy of Jeri Ryan’s divorce, then was propelled right into presidential candidate status by one speech at the democrat convention in 2004.

McCain probably has a better chance of beating Hillary. And I’m not sure myself that we aren’t better off just taking our medicine in the form of Hillary and going into opposition for four years. Bad as she is, Hillary is a known quantity. Hillary will do a couple of very annoying leftist things, but will basically govern (the same way Bill did) by opportunistic and calculated triangulation. Obama is a comparatively unknown quantity, and has alarming abilities to gin up ecstatic emotionalism. We really don’t want Obama to win.

Matt Yglesias experiences a moment of satori, and suddenly understands why conservatives are not very happy about having John McCain as GOP standard-bearer.

Having heard this, I think it seems somewhat obvious in retrospect, but I met a smart conservative thinker last night who explained to me the conservative base’s fear about John McCain in understandable terms for the first time. Basically, McCain or no McCain this still looks like a bad year for the GOP. If he wins, it’s likely to be a personal win based on his persona and tarnishing Obama’s persona, in which the Democrats still pick up some House and Senate seats. Next up, it’s governing time. McCain’s not someone who enjoys a strong personal or professional relationship with John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, and he doesn’t owe any great debt to the GOP activist base. Under the circumstances, it’s plausible to imagine him striking a bunch of compromises with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on domestic issue in order to get a freer hand with which to conduct foreign policy.

That does seem plausible to me.

After Goldwater and Reagan, even liberal Republicans describe themselves “Proud Conservative Republicans,” but sometimes liberals slip up and reveal the truth: They are Proud Conservative Liberal Republicans.

1:21 video

Mike Gallagher applies the New York Times’s own standards of journalism to “the Newspaper of Record.”

I have two sources, both of whom wish to remain anonymous, that report to me that New York Times Editor Bill Keller was spotted in a dumpster last weekend in the Hamptons snorting crack cocaine and smothering a pair of cocker spaniel puppies with a pair of sweat socks.

So now I’m reporting it to you.

Wasn’t that fun?

Of course this isn’t true – not that I know of, anyway – but it sure was easy to get out my laptop and write those words down so thousands of eyes could read them.

Evidently, the “Old Grey Lady” possesses the same standards as a supermarket tabloid that breathlessly reports that “sources” claim they saw Elvis munching on a Krispy Kreme donut in Myrtle Beach.

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times today gave John McCain a slightly belated Valentine’s Day bouquet, in the form of a major, clearly long-prepared profile of the candidate, discussing in great detail John McCain’s past ethics issues, and dropping lots of dark hints about a relationship between the Arizona senator and an attractive telecom lobbyist.

The Huffington Post managed to grab the lady’s profile from her firm’s web-site before it was taken down, and also provides a story of its own.

1:39 video

Original Obama version.

Liberal Michael Kinsley, in Time Magazine, makes fun of the Republican Party’s current situation.

Republicans have pulled some dirty tricks before: Swift Boats, Watergate, you name it. But this time they have gone too far. In its desperate hunger for victory at any cost, the Republican Party is on the verge of choosing a presidential candidate, John McCain, who is widely regarded (everywhere except inside the Republican Party itself) as honest, courageous, likable and intelligent.

Have they no shame?

More important: Have they no principles? In a properly functioning two-party democracy, each party is supposed to nominate a person whom members of the other party will detest. Ordinarily this is not a problem. In recent years, the basic principles of each party have been anathema to the other. If a candidate in addition has a personality that gives the opposition fits, or a few character flaws it deplores, that is gravy. Indeed, since Ronald Reagan (who last ran for office a quarter-century ago), the parties haven’t even liked their own candidates all that much. The dilemma of liking the opposition candidate just hasn’t arisen.

There is a word for it when a political party chooses a presidential candidate with more appeal in the opposition party than in his own. That word is cheating. For heaven’s sake, if the Republicans want to keep the White House that badly, why don’t they just nominate Hillary Clinton and be done with it?

Read the whole thing.

Kinsley, of course, is wrong to blame Republicans.

The ascendancy of John McCain came about as the result of an open primary system which allowed democrats to play too prominent a role in selecting the GOP nominee, and McCain’s unbeatable momentum was largely the product of partisan flackery on the part of the MSM. Kinsley can blame us for allowing our own primary process to be hijacked this year, but he can’t blame us for John McCain.

Andrew C. McCarthy identifies the key flaw in the most popular Pro-McCain argument.

I have not supported Sen. McCain. I admire his perseverance and love of country. Still, I don’t think he is a committed conservative, and his penchant for demonizing all opposition is, to me, extremely off-putting. Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, there’s nothing delusional about that.

In fact, as between the two of us, it’s McCain’s supporters who are deluding themselves. I take them at their word, for example, that a hallmark of the senator’s politics is his tenacity on matters of principle. Consequently, I am skeptical of his assurances that he would appoint conservative judges who will apply rather than create law. Why? Because he has a recent, determined history of beseeching federal courts to disregard the First Amendment in furtherance of a dubious campaign-finance scheme in which he believes passionately. Conservative judges would (and have) rejected this scheme, just as they would (and have) rejected another signature McCain position: the extension of Geneva Convention protections for jihadists.

Now, the appointment of conservative judges is a crucial issue — one McCain posits as central to why we should prefer him to Obama and Clinton. Thus supporters breezily wave off such concerns, maintaining that McCain both promises there will be no issue-based litmus tests for judicial nominees and has conservatives of impeccable legal credentials advising him.

But for me to conclude McCain would surely appoint conservative judges, I also have to believe campaign-finance and the Geneva Convention weren’t all that big a deal to him after all — a possibility that runs counter to everything McCain’s fans tell us about his fidelity to principle.

Read the whole thing.

McCarthy is perfectly right.

Throughout his Senate career, John McCain has demonstrated an eagerness for the good opinion of the media representatives of the establishment elect. He has been steadfastly acritical of simple-minded policies nostrums and violently hostile to theory. Why would anyone suppose that John McCain would suddenly break with the New York Times’ editorial page and start appointing controversial judges likely to roll back what the Times considers progress, including some of his own landmark legislation?

Conservatives are not going to support John McCain.

Unless he selects a spectacular conservative Vice Presidential candidate, that is, and promises to deliver a very long inauguration speech wearing no overcoat.

MacRanger responds to Bill Kristol’s demand that conservatives shape up and get with the program.

Kristol hasn’t got a clue what Reagan meant to the conservative movement. He’s so enamored by the opportunity to get “his boy” sold to the unwashed masses of us who dare to keep the principals of conservatism intact, that he desecrates the legacy of Reagan.

Again, Reagan didn’t appeal to moderates and independents by becoming “like them” or by compromising with their middle of the road ideas. He simply communicated core conservative principals and brought them in. He could bring the three legs of the stool together because he found the common thread among them all, and that’s why we consider him the master.

McCain is a leg and a half conservative and anyone that sits on it is bound for a fall. Since Kristol misses the point on Reagan, he no doubt wouldn’t notice his ass hitting the ground.

And Mona Charen jogs our memories.

The problem with McCain is not just that he strays. George Bush has strayed from conservatism, too. So has Fred Thompson. Certainly Mitt Romney has as well. But Sen. McCain has a knack for saying things in just the tones and accents that liberals prefer. In 2000, he condemned the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance.” In 2004, when Sen. John Kerry was getting his comeuppance from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, vets who had known him during the war and couldn’t remain silent as the Democratic nominee distorted his war record, McCain weighed in by calling the Swift Boaters “dishonorable and dishonest.” When the Bush Administration was being vilified as a nest of Torquemadas for using waterboarding on three occasions, McCain came forward to condemn waterboarding as torture. ...

There is a strutting self-righteousness about McCain that goes hand in hand with a nitroglycerin temper. He flatters himself that his colleagues in the Senate dislike him because he stands up for principle whereas they sell their souls for pork. Not exactly. He is disliked because on many, many occasions, he has been disrespectful, belligerent and vulgar to those who differ with him.

Bradley Smith, former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission and the leading legal scholar on campaign finance issues, experienced the McCain treatment firsthand. Because Smith opposed limits on political speech, he was denounced as “corrupt” by the senator (as was Commissioner Ellen Weintraub). Smith, who lives modestly, jokes that his wife has complained about the absence of jewels and furs.

Though he served on the commission for five years and made several attempts to meet with McCain to discuss the issues, Smith was rebuffed. The two did accidentally meet outside a hearing room in 2004 when they were both scheduled to testify before the Senate rules committee. At first, McCain grasped Smith’s outstretched hand (Smith was in a wheelchair, recovering from surgery), but when he recognized his campaign finance opponent, he snatched his hand back, snarling, “I’m not going to shake your hand. You’re a bully. You have no regard for the Constitution. You’re corrupt.”

Smith, a soft-spoken scholar, ardent patriot and lifelong conservative Republican, cannot, as a matter of honor, pull the lever for McCain. He is far from alone, and that is the Republican Party’s heartbreak in 2008.

Rick Moran has written John McCain’s Conservative Political Action Conference speech for him.

Excerpt:

There are varying degrees of conservatism. I’m from the “Maverick Conservative” wing of the party. This is the wing of conservatism that believes anything the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news nets will praise me for is probably conservative enough. If it’s not, tough. If you think I’m going to change my position on an issue and get the media upset with me, you’re dreaming.

The Maverick Conservative wing of the party – both of us – want to be clear that we support many of the same issues that you “movement” conservatives support. All we ask is that you ignore us when we thumb our noses at you. You can’t expect us to maintain our status as “Mavericks” with the media without deliberately undercutting your agenda while hinting what barbarians you truly are. Therefore, I ask that you simply accept us for who we are.

And calling us “self aggrandizing media whores who care more for pleasing our liberal friends than in working to enact conservative legislation” may be accurate but please – keep it to yourselves.

We can do great things together – as long as you just shut up and vote for me. After all, if it’s between me and Hillary, are you really going to let the Democrats win in November by staying at home? (Try not to look too smug.)

Read the whole thing.

Maksim Maksimovitch has devised a vitally needed voter aid for members of the Republican base trying to win this one at any cost.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

The Washington Post reports that John McCain’s outbursts of temper and abusive language have alienated a lot of Republican colleagues. Some Republicans who’ve experienced these incidents think McCain is unfit to be president.

John McCain once testified under oath that a Senate colleague inappropriately used tobacco corporation donations to sway votes on legislation. He cursed out another colleague in front of 20 senators and staff members, questioning the senator’s grip on immigration legislation. And, on the Senate floor, McCain (R-Ariz.) accused another colleague of “egregious behavior” for helping a defense contractor in a move he said resembled “corporate scandals.”

And those were just the Republicans.

In a chamber once known for cordiality if not outright gentility, McCain has battled his fellow senators for more than two decades in a fashion that has been forceful and sometimes personal. Now, with the conservative maverick on the brink of securing his party’s presidential nomination, McCain’s Republican colleagues are grappling with the idea of him at the top of their ticket. ...

(Some) have outright rejected the idea of a McCain nomination and presidency, warning that his tirades suggest a temperament unfit for the Oval Office.

“The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), also a senior member of the Appropriations panel, told the Boston Globe recently. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

A former colleague says McCain’s abrasive nature would, at minimum, make his relations with Republicans on Capitol Hill uneasy if he were to become president. McCain could find himself the victim of Republicans who will not go the extra mile for him on legislative issues because of past grievances.

“John was very rough in the sandbox,” said former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who is outspoken in his opposition to McCain’s candidacy. “Everybody has a McCain story. If you work in the Senate for a while, you have a McCain story. . . . He hasn’t built up a lot of goodwill.”

Examples:

Defending His Amnesty Bill, Sen. McCain Lost His Temper And “Screamed, ‘F*ck You!’ At Texas Sen. John Cornyn” (R-TX).

Sen. McCain Repeatedly Called Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) An “A**hole”, Causing A Fellow GOP Senator To Say, “I Didn’t Want This Guy Anywhere Near A Trigger.”

Sen. McCain Had A Heated Exchange With Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) And Called Him A “F*cking Jerk.”

In 1995, Sen. McCain Had A “Scuffle” With 92-Year-Old Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) On The Senate Floor.
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Ronald Kessler warns:

People who disagree with him get the f*** you,” said former Rep. John LeBoutillier, a New York Republican who had an encounter with McCain when he was on a POW task force in the House. “I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president.”

Andrew H. “Andy” Card Jr., President Bush’s former chief of staff, told me he has observed McCain’s outbursts.

“Sometimes he was pretty angry, but I felt as if he was putting on a show,” Card said. “I don’t know if it was an emotional eruption or it was for effect,” Card said.

Democrat Paul Johnson, the former mayor of Phoenix, saw McCain’s temper up close. “His volatility borders in the area of being unstable,” Johnson has said. “Before I let this guy put his finger on the button, I would have to give considerable pause.”

When I appeared on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show to discuss Newsmax’s disclosures about McCain’s temper, Carlson said on the air, “We got a call earlier tonight from McCain’s Senate office suggesting that we not do this story. [They were] annoyed about it.”

That hint at intimidation is another reason why major media outlets may think twice about revealing what they know of McCain’s temper, which is widely whispered about in Washington. Yet along with track record, such clues to character are a compass to how a president will conduct his presidency.

Over and over, voters have ignored warning signs of poor character and have overlooked track records, only to regret it once a president enters the White House and becomes corrupted by the power of the office.

His temper has been an issue for years.

In the 2000 presidential bid, McCain was dubbed “Senator Hothead” by Newsweek. That year, he won endorsement from only a few Senate colleagues. His frequent attacks and volatile personality were most likely to blame. “McCain notes,” which offer apologies after heated words, are held by many members of Congress. ...

Paul Mingeroff quotes Dave Keene putting into perspective the increasing volume of calls for Republican unity urging conservatives to get behind John McCain.

There are people who don’t like the idea of a being off a campaign or being on the bad list if the guy gets into the White House,” Mr. Keene said. “This is a town in which 90 percent of the people balance their access and income on the one hand versus their principles on the other.”

Peggy Noonan contemplates the situation of the two parties from a somewhat higher intellectual ground.

Republicans:

On the Republican side an embrace, but an awkward and unfinished one. It’s like the man-hug the pol at the podium now feels he must give to the man he’s just introduced. They used to just shake and say, “Thanks, Bob,” and go to the podium. Now they embrace, with an always apparent self-consciousness. Can you imagine JFK doing this? Or Reagan?

It is this kind of embrace many in the Republican party are giving John McCain. He has real supporters. He keeps winning. But he’s not getting even close to half the vote, as the presumptive nominee should. And he has been at odds with his party on so many things. ...

Mr. McCain seems to me to have two immediate problems, both of which he might address. One is that he doesn’t seem to much like conservatives, and never has. They can’t help admire him, but they’ve disagreed with him on so many issues, and when they bring this up his demeanor tends to morph into the second problem: He radiates, he telegraphs, a certain indignation at being questioned by people who’ve never had to vote in Congress and make a deal. He’s like Moe Greene in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone tells him he’s going to buy him out. “Do you know who I am? I’m Moe Greene. I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders.” I’ve been on the firing line, punk. I am the voice of surviving conservatism.

This doesn’t always go over so well. Mr. Giuliani seems to know Mr. McCain is Moe Greene. Mr. Huckabee probably thought “The Godfather” was kinda violent. Mr. Romney may be thinking to himself, But Michael Corleone won in the end, and had better suits.

Democrats:

All parties, all movements, need men and women who will come forward every decade or so to name tendencies within that are abusive or destructive, to throw off the low and grubby. Teddy’s speech in this regard was a barnburner. He went straight against the negative and bullying, hard for the need to find inspiration again.

He is an old lion of his party, a hero of the base. But people do what they know how to do, and objects at rest tend of stay at rest, and Teddy has long led a comfortable life as a party panjandrum who knew to sit back and watch as the dog barked and the caravan moved on. In a way he seemed to rebel against his own tendencies. He put himself on the line.

“I love this country,” he said, “I believe in the bright light of hope and possibility. I always have.”

As a conservative I would say Ted Kennedy has spent much of his career being not just wrong about the issues but so deeply wrong, so consistently and reliably wrong that it had a kind of grandeur to it. So wrong that I cannot actually think of a single serious policy question on which I agreed with him. But I remember the night President Reagan spoke of Sen. Kennedy’s brother at a fund-raiser for the JFK Library, and I remember the letter Reagan got from Teddy. “Your presence itself was such a magnificent tribute to my brother. . . . The country is well served by your eloquent graceful leadership, Mr. President.” He ended it, “With my prayers and thanks for you as you as you lead us through these difficult times.”

Liberals are rarely interested in pointing out, and conservatives by and large may not know, but everyone who knows Teddy Kennedy knows that he holds a deep love for his country, that he feels a reverence for the presidency and a desire that America be represented with grace abroad and stature at home. He has seen administrations come and go. And maybe much of what he’s learned came forward, came together, this week.

His principled and uncompromising rebellion seemed to me a patriotic act, and adds to the rising tide of Geffenism. When David Geffen broke with Mrs. Clinton last summer, and couched his disapproval along ethical lines, he was almost alone among important Democrats. It took some guts. Now others are joining his side. Good.

Jennifer Rubin wondered what Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt would say.

Here’s what I say.

John Sidney McCain III comes from a three-generation career Navy family. His father and his grandfather were both four-star admirals. His family’s roots are in Mississippi. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958, making him part of the older-than-Baby-Boom generation.

He served in combat in Vietnam. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Communists, and behaved exceptionally honorably in refusing early release from his captivity.

Later, he became a friend of Texas Senator John Tower, who encouraged him to go into politics. He settled in Arizona at the time of his second marriage, and became personally involved with the business community in Phoenix. He was elected to the House of Representatives, and later to the Senate with Barry Goldwater’s support, and currently occupies Barry Goldwater’s former seat.

By birth, background, education, career, culture, and associations, you would expect John McCain to be a rock-ribbed conservative and a loyal Republican.

Unfortunately, he has been anything but either of the above.

John McCain has supported Gun Control, Electoral Advertising Control, and Environmentalist nonsense. He has, since the 1970s when he assisted John Kerry in ending POW/MIA inquiries and normalizing relations with Vietnam, been a frequent supporter of liberal foreign policy preferences and perspectives.

In recent years, almost any time the Senate vote on a controversial polarizing issue was close, John McCain was right in there, voting with the democrats.

Thinking about why McCain so commonly, and so unaccountably, takes the liberal side, I am forced to conclude that his class rank at Annapolis was not an accident, he really is a stupid man.

American Conservatism, after all, takes in general comparatively unpopular positions, resists facile solutions, sweeping measures, and emotional appeals. Conservatives are skeptics concerning conventional wisdom and the consensus of the media. Conservatives are the purists of American government, the critics on behalf of Constitutionalism and the defenders of the fundamental theory of American republicanism.

And Conservatism, outside fiscal areas, has little appeal to John McCain. He is always perfectly willing to brush aside the fine points of the meaning of the Bill of Rights and individual rights theory. One tends to suspect that the rigid authoritarianism of the Naval Academy and the unlimited command authority ruling over military life seem normal and natural to John McCain.

While Conservative theory and fundamentalist Constitutionalism have little influence on him, when the voice of what Thomas Sowell likes to refer to as “the Elect” is heard speaking from the high ground of the Establishment media, John McCain typically comes eagerly to attention. Even on military issues, like the non-reciprocal extension of Geneva Convention privileges to violators of all the laws of war, McCain marches at the Establishment’s command and vigorously defends their position.

Here, I think, one detects in John McCain’s behavior another recognizable military cultural meme, that of the apple-polishing subaltern jumping to obey the orders and loyally following the flag of his Senior Officer in Command, from whom all good things—including promotion—flow. John McCain’s commander in recent years has obviously been the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

And that, I think, explains John McCain. He’s a just-not-very-deep guy, who recognizes the power of the liberal establishment and naturally defers to it.

He is not loyal to us, and he is not one of us.

As he observed in the HBO film by Barry Goldwater’s daughter Mr. Conservative:

I’d love to be remembered as a Goldwater Republican. But I don’t pretend in any way to live up to (his) legacy.

We’re going to be hearing from those hungry to win the election about how John McCain is our best chance. Perhaps, he is. He’ll obviously run to the left of recent GOP presidential candidates and consequently draw some votes from the opposition. And he is a war hero.

But, if we win with McCain, we will be sorry. He will do liberal things. He will do dumb things. And he’ll put a liberal power structure in control of the Republican Party.

We may simply be screwed this go round. Our adversaries have the momentum, and we may simply not have a winning, conservative candidate. If we are going to lose, we should just lose, and fight again another day. We should not support John McCain.

0:30 video

Hat tip to Kevin Drum. We on the Right have not yet begun to fight.

Michael Graham is despairing at The Corner:

Assuming there is no shocking revelation or health issue, the GOP nomination is over. Conservatives need to start practicing the phrase “Nominee presumptive John McCa…..”

I’m not quite so pessimistic. I think Rush and the rest of Conservative Talk Radio will yet marshal the base and put up a fight.

And, of course, we can’t really count on Romney or McCain with assurance to defeat either Lady Macbeth or the Magical Minority Man.

But, if John McCain were to capture the GOP nomination, and, you never know, something (like a successful act of terrorism) happened to turn public opinion away from its current course, and he was elected, think about it: the man is going to be 72 in August.

William Henry Harrison, the oldest man elected president who was not Ronald Reagan, was 68, and he caught cold during his inauguration and promptly died. Needless to say, John McCain is no Ronald Reagan.

In the event that McCain is nominated, we should probably be focusing very carefully on whom the GOP nominates for the vice presidency.

Michelle Malkin (and apparently Rush Limbaugh) are hot on the trail of a story of Independents voting in yesterday’s Florida GOP primary.

A CNN exit poll (page 4) listed GOP primary voters in Florida by Party ID, as:

Democrat (3%)

Independent (17%)

So, according to CNN exit polls, 20% of the voters in the Florida Republican Party primary were non-Republicans. If so, no wonder McCain won.

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Captain Ed Morrissey, though, says that “voter identification” (with the other party or no party) is routine in closed primary state polling. It is actual voter registration which is determinative, and this kind of polling result is normal.

Randall Hoven examines John McCain’s 82.3% ACU rating. His conclusion is “not very.”

Senator John McCain’s lifetime rating of 82.3% from the American Conservative Union is often cited as proof that he is conservative. Here is a closer look at that 82.3 rating.

First, a rating of 82.3 is not really that high. It puts Senator McCain in 39th place among senators serving in 2006, the latest year for which the ACU has its ratings posted online. For that most recent year in particular, McCain scored only 65, putting him in 47th place for that year. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE), for example, scored 64 and 75, respectively, in 2006.

Generally, McCain has voted less conservatively in more recent years. His average for 1990-97 was 88, but was only 74 for 1998-2006. ...

So where did McCain differ from the ACU? The big areas were taxes, campaign finance reform, the environment and, most recently, immigration. There was also a smattering of support for trial lawyers; federal intervention in health, education, safety or voting issues; internationalism; and some social issues. He was more consistently conservative on spending and defense issues. ...

Many of the votes were close. In one third of these votes, a swing of only two senators would have changed the outcome. In over two thirds, a swing of ten senators would have changed the outcome. As someone remarked, McCain is like a baseball player who gets all his hits after two outs and no one on base, and all his outs with men in scoring position. ...

McCain’s ACU ratings since 1998 put him on the liberal side among Republicans. The few Republicans consistently more liberal than McCain would be Chafee (formerly R-RI), Collins (R-ME), Snowe (R-ME) and Specter (R-PA). One could expect senators from northeastern states to be more liberal since their constituencies demand it, but McCain represents the fairly conservative state of Arizona. (Arizona’s other senator, Kyl, has a lifetime rating of 96.9, and half the representatives from there have ratings of 94.7 or higher.)

How much more liberal would McCain vote if his constituency put even the slightest pressure on him in that direction?

Mother Jones likes John McCain and thinks it’s just awful that conservatives are saying such mean things about him.

Die-hard conservatives despise McCain for multiple reasons. Primarily, they fear the impact his candidacy could have on the Republican Party and the conservative movement. For conservatives, derailing McCain’s candidacy is not about electability, but ideological protection. As conservative writer and activist Robert Tracinski put it this week in an article titled “Why McCain Needs to Be Stopped,” “McCain is a suicidal choice for Republicans, because on every issue other than the war, he stands for capitulation to the left.” And conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt recently said a “GOP vote for McCain is a vote for a shattered base.”

Conservatives also feel that McCain has routinely frustrated their ambitions by taking heretical policy stances. “Almost at every turn on domestic policy,” Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, said in a recent radio interview, “John McCain was not only against us, but leading the charge on the other side.” Just a day earlier Santorum had gone on a different radio show as part of his anti-McCain jihad and attacked the senator on a variety of issues. “He’s not with us on almost all of the core issues,” he said. “He was against the President’s tax cuts. He was bad on immigration. On the environment, he’s absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left-wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues.”

“We’d of had a much bigger tax cut if John McCain had voted with us,” said DeLay on Fox. “We’d be drilling in ANWR [Artic National Wildlife Refuge] today” if not for McCain.

And the traitors at the New York Times have endorsed him, too:

Still, there is a choice to be made, and it is an easy one. Senator John McCain of Arizona is the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe. With a record of working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation, he would offer a choice to a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field.

When Mother Jones and the Times like him, it ought to be pretty obvious that he does not belong at the top of the Republican ticket.

The St. Petersburg Times reports that, as the GOP contest moves on from open primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina to more significant states like Florida where Republicans actually decide the winner of the Republican primary, the form of the decisive battle is taking shape.

It’s Mitt Romney vs. John McCain in the final stretch of Florida’s crucial Republican primary.

A new St. Petersburg Times poll shows the former Massachusetts governor and Arizona senator neck and neck among Florida Republicans, while Rudy Giuliani’s Florida-or-bust strategy has been a bust.

Neocon Michael Medved pulled out all the casuistical stops yesterday in a shameless attempt to defend Senator John McCain. Evidently moving over to the conservative side has not cured Michael of the liberal habit of employing highly selective evidence to make a preposterous case.

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter summed up McCain’s candidacy far more accurately and succinctly: “John McCain is Bob Dole minus the charm, conservatism and youth.”

David Brooks (the New York Times’ resident ersatz-conservative) thinks that the Conservative Movement’s definition of a conservative is too narrow, and ought to be enlarged to include not only himself but also Senator John McCain.

McCain is the MSM’s current anointed front-runner on the basis of having come in in first in primaries open to non-Republican voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina. I think myself all those primaries really did establish the fact that John McCain is, by a small margin at the present time, the favorite Republican candidate of non-Republicans.

When I contemplate John McCain’s candidacy and his political record, I feel obliged to agree that McCain deserves to be the presidential candidate of a major party, just not of the Republican Party.

What John McCain really is is a pre-McGovern era, non-urban patriotic democrat. McCain has been a reliable democrat vote in the Senate on every major issue, except for taxes (sometimes) and defense issues. He is not in the least conservative on restraining government, limiting regulation, or defending the rights of the individual outside the sphere of rights supported by the community of fashion. He is the sort of person who would sit comfortably in the Council of Foreign Relations, and who could be trusted to be largely guided by the perspectives of the editorial pages of the Post and the Times.

He differs from other democrats only with respect to a Scoop Jackson-like enthusiasm for defense funding and propensity to take the side of the US rather than that of any available foreign adversary in conflicts overseas.

Dave Brooks thinks McCain is a potentially winning presidential candidate.

If so, I’d say the party he really belongs in, the party of statism, establishmentarianism, and intellectual conformity, ought to be nominating him. He should not be trying to run as a Republican.

Of course, it’s the press that has manufactured a great deal of drama which wasn’t really there, in Iowa and New Hampshire. Lady Macbeth has again found her voice (1:01 video) and is back on step toward her virtually inevitable coronation in Denver.

Huffington Post:

Hillary Clinton has eked out a crucial win in New Hampshire, a state her aides have long staked out as the “firewall” in her quest for the Democratic nomination. At roughly three points, the margin of victory is far smaller than her lead in state polls over the past 11 months, which often topped 20 points. But Clinton’s success will surely help stabilize her presidential campaign, which was rocked by infighting since her loss in Iowa. Rumors of a major staff shakeup had percolated for days: Campaign Co-Chair Terry McAuliffe already annouced that the campaign would “bring in more people to help,” while James Carville and Paul Begala spent the primary day denying rumors they were taking over. On Tuesday afternoon, a Democratic source told The Nation that Team Hillary was still debating whether to hand the reins over to Steve Richetti, who served as President Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff – the strategic post that Karl Rove made famous.

Yet Clinton cleared away the doubts and struck an inspiring note in her victory speech, telling New Hampshire voters, “I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice. I felt like we all spoke from our hearts and I am so gratified that you responded!” She was met with roaring applause. Clinton likened the narrow victory to her husband’s famous “comeback” in 1992, when he battled back to a surprising second place finish in New Hampshire. Then she offered a much more important parallel, vowing to give America the “kind of comeback” that New Hampshire just gave her.

McCain’s victory, of course, is just an artifact of the New Hampshire open primary. He is the non-Republican’s preferred Republican candidate.

The ever-witty Mark Steyn comments on the Republican Winter of our Discontent.

Confronted by Preacher Huckabee standing astride the Iowa caucuses, smirking, “Are you feelin’ Hucky, punk?”, many of my conservative pals are inclined to respond, “Shoot me now.”

But, if that seems a little dramatic, let’s try and rustle up an alternative.

In response to the evangelical tide from the west, New Hampshire primary voters have figured, “Any old crusty, cranky, craggy coot in a storm,” and re-embraced John McCain. After all, Granite State conservatism is not known for its religious fervor: it prefers small government, low taxes, minimal regulation, the freedom to be left alone by the state. So they’re voting for a guy who opposed the Bush tax cuts, and imposed on the nation the most explicit restriction in political speech in years. Better yet, after a freezing first week of January and the snowiest December in a century, New Hampshire conservatives are goo-goo for a fellow who also believes the scariest of global-warming scenarios and all the big-government solutions necessary to avert them.

Well, OK, maybe we can rustle up an alternative to the alternative.

Rudy Giuliani’s team is betting that, after a Huck/McCain seesaw through the early states, Florida voters by Jan. 29 will be ready to unite their party behind a less-divisive figure, if by “less divisive figure” you mean a pro-abortion gun-grabbing cross-dresser. ...

Where I part company with Huck’s supporters is in believing he’s any kind of solution. He’s friendlier to the teachers’ unions than any other so-called “cultural conservative” – which is why in New Hampshire he’s the first Republican to be endorsed by the NEA. His health care pitch is Attack Of The Fifty Foot Nanny, beginning with his nationwide smoking ban. This is, as Jonah Goldberg put it, compassionate conservatism on steroids – big paternalistic government that can only enervate even further “our culture.”

So, Iowa chose to reward, on the Democrat side, a proponent of the conventional secular left, and, on the Republican side, a proponent of a new Christian left. If that’s the choice, this is going to be a long election year.

Quinn Hilyer looks at John McCain, who has been garnering endorsements in new Hampshire recently, and shudders.

As truly horrific as it would be for the liberal and unethical Mike Huckabee to win the Republican presidential nomination, many Republicans still believe it would be almost as difficult to stomach the nomination of John McCain.

Huckabee, of course, would utterly destroy the old Reagan coalition, as even his campaign chief Ed Rollins has acknowledged. Huckabee’s bizarre propensity for letting criminals return early to freedom, combined with his utter cluelessness about foreign policy, also means that he would get absolutely crushed by the Democrats in a general election contest.

But McCain’s problems are almost as great, which is why reports of a comeback by the Arizona senator have so many conservatives scratching their heads.

McCain is, and looks, more than two years older than Ronald Reagan was when Reagan was elected president, and a poll last year showed that 42 percent of respondents said they would not vote for somebody who is 72 years old. That is a far higher percentage than that of people who would not vote for a Mormon (24 percent), a woman (11 percent), or a black person (5 percent).

McCain is not a tax cutter in a party that has made tax cuts one of its most basic tenets for nearly 30 years. Not only did he vote against President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003—cuts that clearly are responsible for the booming economy of the past four-plus years—but just last week he told National Review’s Rich Lowry that he was correct not to vote for those tax cuts.

David Kurtz, at Talking Points Memo, wonders why the New York Times isn’t doing its job of serving the interests of the Left in today’s campaign politics story by finger-pointing and hyperventilating over John McCain’s failure to punish the supporter in South Carolina who referred to the Lady Macbeth of Chappaqua using a less than complimentary term.

(Incident originally linked here).

Not only did the Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye fail to punish John McCain and Republicans generally, she actually did what is even more unthinkable, and noted that the incident could actually work against Hillary.

And then, in expressing his own indignation over this completely irresponsible disclosure, Kurtz then falls into exactly the same trap himself and winds up saying the same (true) thing even more explicitly.

But we also learn from Seelye that this whole incident could really hurt Clinton because, you know, it’s a reminder of how much voters don’t like her:

Mr. McCain’s attack on CNN also serves to keep the episode involving the hostile question alive and as a reminder that many voters view Mrs. Clinton as divisive.

Sort of a polite way of saying Hillary really is a bitch.

A hat tip, and thanks for an afternoon laugh, to TPM!

John McCain: “That’s an excellent question.”

1:13 video

Hat tip to John Amato, who is shocked… shocked.
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11/16: I just noticed that I had overlooked the link to “John Amato” above. Apologies to readers, and to Mr. Amato.

John Hinderaker, at Power-Line, quotes an eloquent remonstrance from John McCain to his despicable colleagues in the Senate. He titled it: A Man Addresses the Boys.

Let us keep in the front of our minds the likely consequences of premature withdrawal from Iraq. Many of my colleagues would like to believe that, should the withdrawal amendment we are currently debating become law, it would mark the end of this long effort. They are wrong. Should the Congress force a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, it would mark a new beginning, the start of a new, more dangerous, and more arduous effort to contain the forces unleashed by our disengagement.
No matter where my colleagues came down in 2003 about the centrality of Iraq to the war on terror, there can simply be no debate that our efforts in Iraq today are critical to the wider struggle against violent Islamic extremism. Already, the terrorists are emboldened, excited that America is talking not about winning in Iraq, but is rather debating when we should lose.

***

Mr. President, the terrorists are in this war to win it. The question is: Are we?

***

The supporters of this amendment respond that they do not by any means intend to cede the battlefield to al Qaeda; on the contrary, their legislation would allow U.S. forces, presumably holed up in forward operating bases, to carry out targeted counterterrorism operations. But our own military commanders say that this approach will not succeed, and that moving in with search and destroy missions to kill and capture terrorists, only to immediately cede the territory to the enemy, is the failed strategy of the past three and a half years.

***

Mr. President, this fight is about Iraq but not about Iraq alone. It is greater than that and more important still, about whether America still has the political courage to fight for victory or whether we will settle for defeat, with all of the terrible things that accompany it. We cannot walk away gracefully from defeat in this war.

What a fine leader and desirable Republican presidential candidate a reliably conservative John McCain could have made!
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I don’t agree with Harold Meyerson’s politics or his defeatist view of the situation in Iraq, but I wholeheartedly endorse his characterization of a number of Republican senators:

Anyone searching for the highest forms of invertebrate life need look no further than the floor of the U.S. Senate last week and this. These spineless specimens go by various names—Republican moderates; respected senior Republicans; Dick Lugar, John Warner, Pete Domenici, George Voinovich.

But if weak-kneed Republican bedwetters running for political cover are rightly described as invertebrate, leftist democrats who make a profession and career out of opposing their country’s cause and stabbing American troops in the back are obviously still lower on the evolutionary scale.

John McCain has been making serious movements in a rightward direction recently, speaking out against gun control, urging America to stay the course in Iraq. (You might almost think he was running for president, or something.)

This little vignette at the Murrells Inlet, South Carolina VFW Hall was downright endearing. The moonbats were wetting their beds over at Daily Kos over it: Splash1, Splash2, Splash3.

0:42 video

That Kos-linked video is being flooded with attention, and isn’t loading in a timely fashion. Here’s the same thing at an alternative link.

Here’s the complete version (on a leftwing site, but I enjoyed it anyway).

Pat Toomey, whom Bush ought to have supported in a primary against Arlen Spector, explains why John McCain’s record makes him unacceptable as Republican nominee for the presidency.

The reduction of tax rates on income and investment is a cornerstone of limited-government philosophy and a powerful driver of economic growth. When the most important pro-growth tax cuts in a generation were proposed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, Sen. McCain vigorously opposed them. While he has more recently supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts and has previously proposed requiring a supermajority vote in Congress to raise taxes, the extent of his opposition in 2001 and 2003 supersedes any potentially redeeming votes.

Sen. McCain was one of only two Republican senators to oppose the 2001 tax cuts and one of only three GOP senators to oppose the 2003 reductions. Furthermore, his reason for opposing the cuts was taken straight from the playbook of the most radical left-wing Democrats. In 2001, Sen. McCain argued, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.”

That statement is virtually indistinguishable from the class-warfare demagoguery used by Democrats like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. More importantly, it was grossly inaccurate. The Bush tax cuts lowered income taxes, and other taxes, for every American who paid them. In percentage terms, lower-income workers enjoyed the greatest savings, and today, upper-income workers pay a larger share of total income taxes than they did before the Bush tax cuts.

Sen. McCain did much more than just criticize the Bush tax cuts—he also joined leading liberal senators in offering and voting for amendments designed to undermine them. All in all, he voted on the pro-tax side of 14 such amendments in 2001 and 2003. These included an amendment he co-sponsored with Sen. Tom Daschle to limit the rate reduction in the top tax bracket to one percentage point and an amendment sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold against full repeal of the estate tax, aka the death tax. This latter vote is in keeping with Senator McCain’s 2002 vote against repealing the death tax…

Over the years, Sen. McCain has supported a number of other big-government bills, including an amendment that would authorize the government to set prices on prescription drugs under Medicare and an amendment to prohibit oil drilling in part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

But of all his infringements on personal freedom, Sen. McCain’s persistent attacks on political speech are the most worrisome. The First Amendment is an important safeguard of pro-growth policies. When government strays from sound economic policies, citizens must be free to exercise their constitutional rights to petition and criticize those policies and the politicians responsible for them. The 2002 McCain-Feingold bill (or the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act), named in part for the Arizona senator who gave it life, seeks to squash political dissent by imposing grossly unconstitutional restrictions on citizen participation in political debate.

In defense of the bill’s provision severely limiting the freedom of private groups to run political TV ads, Sen. McCain argued in a Supreme Court brief, “These ads are direct, blatant attacks on the candidates. We don’t think that’s right.” He thus anointed himself the arbiter of appropriate political speech, worthy of deciphering which speech is “right” and which should be permitted in American political debate. His law constitutes the greatest modern infringement of the First Amendment right to political free speech. While bestowing significant advantages upon incumbent office holders, it has created neither a less corrupt political domain nor a more democratic one.

I would support Newt Gingrich, possibly Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson, but definitely not Giuliani or McCain.

The McCain campaign has some very professionally produced videos on its website, which are worth a look. Some of the left blogs are screaming in indignation about them.

The tribute to Reagan (and to Goldwater) is very nice indeed. Pity that John McCain is not a Reagan and Goldwater Republican after all.