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.

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?

Bruce Walker draws our attention to an important anniversary.

On Sunday, January 27, 2008, our nation celebrates an important political anniversary. Ten years ago Hillary Clinton (then the First Lady) went on television with Matt Lauer and said:

“This is the great story here for anybody willing to find and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

Thus was born the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

I must confess that I had interpreted all the MSM reports that Fred Thompson had no fire in his belly for presidential campaigning, and that he was considering withdrawing last week, and this week, and next week as liberal wishful thinking at its worst.

But it appears that, for once, they were telling the truth.

Fred Thompson clearly was some kind of half-committed, thoroughly disorganized faux candidate, since he washed himself out on the basis of low attendance results from a couple of thoroughly non-determinative open primaries. Fred was like one of those Civil War political-appointee generals who marched up to the front, heard a little gunfire, and then rapidly beat a panicky retreat. His departure from the field can hardly be regarded as a major loss to Conservative cause, judged with respect to either his demonstrated competence or resolution.

It seemed like bad news at the time, but we’ll get over it.

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.

But Bill Kristol observes: “You fight an election with the politicians you have.”

(Reagan) was a conservative first and a politician second, a National Review and Human Events reader first and an elected official second.

This is exceedingly unusual. The normal American president is a politician, with semicoherent ideological views, who sometimes becomes a vehicle for an ideological movement. …

This year’s GOP field is, in this sense, normal.

Sigh.

Kristol is witty, but I think his neocon perspective is wrong. Republicans electing non-ideological-conservatives, Nixons and Bushes, only results in more liberal policies, a larger federal government, and, finally, a Republican electoral debacle.

He is right in observing that, in this presidential election, and in recent American politics generally, no obvious unquestionably conservative leader has emerged in the nation and the Republican Party. We need to ask ourselves why. And we need to start producing them again, not settling for substitutes.

The founding era figure dismissed contemptuously by John Adams as “the bastard brat of a Scots pedlar” has in recent years been adopted as a particular hero by the same Neocons who are typically currently supporting Rudolph Giuliani for many of the same reasons.

Hamilton’s championship of the interests of the financial community has a natural appeal to New Yorkers, and Hamilton’s enthusiasm for centralization and the activism and expansion of federal power accords comfortably with many of the basic views of former New Deal liberals, ousted from their once-comfortable home in the democrat party by the radical left.

William Hogeland, in Boston Review, discusses the Hamilton revival, reviews its literature in detail, and notes Hamilton’s Janet Reno-ish eagerness to resort to armed federal force as a key factor disqualifying the Nevis Creole from serving as an appropriate icon for American conservatism.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

A number of my conservative friends are selling out to Giuliani on the basis of supposed electability. Going outside the conservative fold in hope of electoral success has proven in the past to be a mistake, and would be a mistake again.

My own view is that Giuliani is a lot like Nixon, who, as everyone needs to remember, was an electable compromise who turned into a disaster for Republicans with respect to policy, and who produced a thoroughgoing political debacle as well.

Like Nixon, Giuliani is not conservative. He is merely a statist authoritarian. But Giuliani is even worse than Nixon. He has only very recently become strongly self-identified as Republican at all or made even the slightest pretension towards conservatism. Unlike Nixon, who was at least occasionally allied with Republican conservatives, Giuliani has been an outright enemy of the Republican Right who endorsed the ultra-liberal democrat Mario Cuomo in 1994 rather than support George Pataki (who was back then erroneously believed to be a serious conservative).

It is perfectly obvious that Giuliani’s recent conversions are entirely related to the personal opportunities they offer in 2008, and, were he to be elected, it is very doubtful any of those new commitments would endure as long after the election as the interval that they preceded it. Once in office, Giuliani would have new priorities far more important to him than Republicanism, Conservatism, or keeping faith with people foolish enough to elect him. He would immediately start taking steps to create a personal legacy and secure a second term.

Both goals would be more easily achieved by changing course and (like his non-conservative predecessor Richard Nixon) supporting the key top items on the liberal establishment’s agenda. So expect Rudolf to get right to work on the contemporary equivalent of enacting Affirmative Action, betraying Taiwan, passing the Endangered Species Act (giving the federal government an excuse to preclude private use of any piece of property), and implementing Wage and Price Controls. The more support he can get personally the better for him, so watch for a series of democrat appointments and a major sellout on court appointments.

Can we predict specifics of Rudy’s betrayals? Some of them I think we can.

Giuliani’s equivalent of Nixon’s Affirmative Action will be federalized Gay Marriage. His equivalent of the Endangered Species Act will be the adoption of the Kyoto Treaty and the creation of Carbon Credits. (Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins get very, very rich.) Giuliani’s Wage & Price Controls? Expect hizonner to raise taxes, to go after the Hedge Fund industry, and to revive Anti-Trust. Giuliani will continue from the White House his practice of building personal power by playing the role of class warrior and brutalizing more nouveau and vulnerable economic contestants on behalf of more established sections of the Financial Community. Doubtless, he will also find allies in the tech sector on whose behalf he can break up “monopolies.” With whom Giuliani will make a deal overseas is less clear right now. Perhaps he would preside over the reunification of Taipei with the Mainland and get his own opera.

Joel Stein wrote up a pre-fabricated all-purpose Ann Coulter column, including parenthetical spaces where Ann Coulter herself could supply the necessary inflammatory mot juste. He then sent it to her, and –sure enough– Ann Coulter obligingly filled in the blanks.

Liberals Are Wusses

By Ann Coulter

Can liberals really be that easily offended? Are their beliefs so fragile, their emotions so unstable, their [body part, plural] EYELASHES so [adjective] PRETTY, that my offhand remarks threaten to destroy their entire belief system?

Maybe this is because liberals don’t have a solid belief system. They don’t believe in the Bible. They don’t believe in the Constitution (you know, that piece of paper that Bill Clinton thought was for cleaning up [something messy] DEMOCRATS’ POSITION ON NATIONAL SECURITY after he [verb, past tense] JITTERBUGGED. And they don’t believe in [book] “JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL.” So instead they believe in whatever feels good, whether that is engaging in [physical therapy] PILATES in the Oval Office, putting [noun] PUPPIES up their [body part] FINGERNAILS or spending [large sum of money] $1 ZILLION on [beauty regimen] FACE-WASHING like [lack of manliness] LIBERAL [male democrat] HILLARY CLINTON did when he visited [European city] LUXEMBOURG.

They may have no idea about good and evil — how could a group that hates [morally unimpeachable act] FEEDING THE POOR, thinks it’s a crime to place the Ten Commandments in [place] BOISE, IDAHO, and defines marriage as a union between two [noun, plural] BABY SEALS? — but they sure are good at telling people what you shouldn’t say. And what they don’t want said is anything that resembles truth. So they’re disgusted when I point out that the [Indian tribe] NAVAJO practice of celebrating [something gross] DEMOCRATS’ POSITION ON ABORTION is endangering our children, or the fact that [percentage] 20% of [immigrant group] LATVIANS commit [horrendous crime] INCOME TAX within [number] SEVEN days of coming to our country illegally by [mode of transportation] GULFSTREAM JET.

When I was on [obscure cable news show] ANYTHING ON MSNBC, I mentioned to fellow guest [grumpy old white man] WALTER CRONKITE that, scientifically, men are [any number] 47 times more likely to accomplish [an incredible feat] A LIBERAL LISTENING POLITELY TO AN OPPOSING POINT OF VIEW than women, who should stay at home and focus on [obsolete chore] BUTTER CHURNING. When [New York Times columnist] FRANK RICH heard this, he bored himself writing [large number] A KAZILLION words about it, referring to me as a skinny, blond [adjective] PEPPY [animal] BEAGLE. The point here is that he called me skinny and blond.

So let the Democrats be offended by me. I consider their every objection a testament to my righteousness. After all, this is a party that’s about to choose [democratic presidential candidate] B. HUSSEIN OBAMA as their nominee — a person whose chief of staff is [made-up name] JOHN DOE, who spoke at rallies cosponsored by the [radical liberal group] WEATHERMEN protesting the [beloved institution] FOX NEWS CHANNEL, in which members [violent action] THROAT-SLIT the [beloved symbol] AMERICAN FLAG and supported guilty [cop killer who’s first name is Mumia] MUMIA ABU JAMAL. So while my Godless, liberal detractors are in hell with the [non-Christian group] MASONS, [ethnic group] ALEUTS, [occupation, plural] DOCTORS and [deceased Democrat] MIKE GRAVEL, I’ll be in heaven dying my hair and not eating. Because the one person I haven’t offended is God. And [a conservative or book publisher] RUSH LIMBAUGH.

Kevin Drum mockingly proposes that readers pick the five “All-time Wingnuttiest” ( i.e. the worst from a leftist perspective) blog posts from his own list of fourteen nominees.

Inevitably, he includes some not-especially-interesting (Gotcha!) Iraq War posts:

Glenn Reynolds

and Steven Den Beste
(Cut and paste the link to read the post: http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/03/Itsthewaiting.shtml),

some a bit too eccentric:

Pam Geller proving that she can’t sing –though she does dance well–,

Ann Althouse obsessing over Jessica Valenti’s breasts),

and a few not really here or there, but curiously enough he actually does nominate some real winners, some important conservative blog posts of unusual merit and long term interest:

Bill Whittle (after Katrina): “Tribes”
-Despite its embarrassing public display of warrior self-identification, Whittle’s Tribes is a truly classic post which says something fundamental, real, and important.

Lee Siegel: “The Origins of Blogofascism”
-This one is a landmark post in the history of the blogosphere, identifying a serious problem and pathology.

Ben Domenech: “Pachyderms in the Mist”
-Don’t listen to him at your peril, democrats.

Kim du Toit: “The Pussification of the Western Male”
-Sure it’s a rant, but it’s a fine rant.

Michelle Malkin: “The Defeatocrats Cheer”
-Michelle Malkin is very cute, and she can cheerlead.

But, in his effort to pick the all-time greats, Kevin Drum did manage to overlook the single most important blog post of all-time:

Charles Johnson: Bush Guard Documents: Forged

And, undeservedly I thought, he overlooked my own:
Gone to Live on a Farm

Michael Tomaskey is whistling in the dark in the Guardian, hoping that George W. Bush’s second-term unpopularity signals a long-term change in the direction of American politics.

By 1964, conservatives were able to nominate one of their own, Barry Goldwater, for president. But it took them another 16 years to elect a president, Reagan. And then it took another 14 years before Republicans led by Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives, for conservatives to seize power at a level below the presidency. In all that time, your “average”- that is, nonpolitical – American had no deeply negative experience of movement conservatism. It wasn’t quite the golden age that today’s embattled conservatives contend it was; for example, Reagan left office with a lower approval rating than Bill Clinton did.

Nevertheless, most average people found the experience of conservative governance more positive than not: Reagan cut their taxes, stared down the Russkies and made them feel good about their country. Even Gingrich and his cohort, before being laid deservedly low by their obsession with Clinton’s sex life, were credited by your average Joe with having cleaned out the Augean stables of Democratic Washington.

Then came Bush. At first things were motoring along nicely, and Bush guru Karl Rove’s prediction that a permanent conservative majority was coalescing seemed probable. Now it has all crashed and burned for the reasons we know about. But we still don’t know what exactly is that “it”.

That is, Americans have now experienced a conservative government failing them. But what lesson will they take? That conservatism itself is exhausted and without answers to the problems that confront American and the world today? Or will they conclude that the problem hasn’t been conservatism per se, just Bush, and that a conservatism that is competent and comparatively honest will suit them just fine?

Conservatives and the Republican presidential candidates hope and argue that it’s the latter. They largely endorse and in some cases vow to expand on the Bush administration’s policies – Mitt Romney’s infamous promise to “double” the size of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, notably. Like Bush, they vow that tax cuts, deregulation and smaller government will solve every domestic problem. Where they try to distinguish themselves from Bush is on competence. Romney talks up his corporate success, Rudy Giuliani his prowess as mayor of New York.

The Democrats aren’t as full-throated in opposition to all this as one would hope – they dance away from the word “liberal” and they don’t really traffic in head-on philosophical critiques of conservative governance. That said, though, all the leading Democrats are running on pretty strongly progressive platforms.

On healthcare, energy and global warming, all promise a very different direction for the country. Hillary Clinton has even inched to her husband’s left on trade issues. Even given her innate caution and rhetorical hawkishness on foreign policy, it’s fair to say that Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are making a forceful case for a clean ideological break.

The rubber will hit the road next summer and autumn. Then the Republicans will tell voters that the Democratic nominee has proposed trillions of dollars’ worth of new programmes and will inevitably raise taxes to pay for them. The Democrat will need to stand her or his ground and, while obviously not being cavalier about taxes, present a vision of a different kind of society. There are signs that 51% of the voters may be ready to embrace it.

I think it’s true that George W. Bush failed to get control of his own government, failed to mobilize the American people as a whole in support of American military efforts, and failed to defend himself and his policies with adequate vigor and effectiveness. Consequently, the democrat party is enjoying positive political momentum going into the 2008 Presidential Election, but the victory of Hillary Clinton is still far from assured.

Even if Hillary wins, it seems doubtful that she will succeed in effectuating a reversal of the historic tide away from statism and collectivism. Most probably, if Hillary is indeed elected, the democrat radical base will grow quickly embittered by her moderation, and will turn their full fury on her. Hillary may only succeed in achieving in one term the loss of approval and support unsuccessful presidents more commonly experience at the end of two.

David Brooks grazes meditatively beneath the New York Times’ luxuriant English oaks.

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.

Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.” …

To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.

American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is retrained by the caution of its Burkean roots.

There is something, doubtless, about a New York Times editorial position, possibly the prestigious title or perhaps the unlimited expense account, which is liable to make any man into a Burkean defender of the status quo.

Mr. Brooks is, however, clearly confusing American with British conservatism, when he describes it in these emolient and unthreatening Burkean terms. But the American case is very different.

The roots of American conservatism lie in the American Revolution against Royal authority and established traditions of governmental supremacy. And the pedigree of modern American conservatism goes back to the movement which took over the GOP led by Barry Goldwater and his supporters.

Barry Goldwater was correctly perceived as a radical opponent of the New Deal’s established order of Welfarism, mixed economy socialism, Big Government and tolerance of International Communism, the champion of a collection of American principles and ideals, which (however originalist) were so utterly alien to the prevailing Establishment consensus as to seem revolutionary.

Mr. Brooks needs to remember that the father of the modern conservative Republican Party is the man who said “Extremism in defense of Liberty is no vice.”