A Vote For McCain Is A Vote For Hillary Is A Vote For Obama

I swear, if I have to listen to tone-deaf flacks like Hugh Hewitt spend the next eight months thumping the tub for a man (Senator John McCain) whose Republican nomination Double-H himself spent months correctly proclaiming to be a disaster in the making, well, I might just be driven to start a blog.  Or maybe something even more drastic.

This past week he was at it again, both on his blog and his syndicated column.  Let's take 'em in chronological order.

On Tuesday Hugh made the old college try with this:

What is going on within the center-right now is a legitmate, idea-driven argument that involves sorting through a great number of issues.  If the most important issue in your life was the confirmation of one of the judges who did not get confirmed in the course of the judicial nomination wars of 2001 through 2006, you might never get around to supporting McCain, or it might take you longer.

Actually, this argument has nothing to do with sorting through issues.  It has to do with the temptation to forget the past seven years of betrayals, screwings, and back-stabbings of the GOP and its agenda engineered, masterminded, and carried out by Senator McCain and pretend that he's a conservative and worthy of our trust.  Particularly in the negative sense of being "better than the alternative".

Now I'll admit that the specter of some combination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama is more than a little hair-raising, particularly given that the Fourth World War still rages across the world, and could get very hot very soon.  But if averting that nightmare was our objective, elevating Darth Queeg was the worst imaginable choice for it.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Other hosts and conservative activists have other sets of issues. For  me, though, the number one issue is pursuing victory in the war, and that has been issue #1 since 9/11....If you believe the country is threatened by a jihadist network backed by rogue states like Iran and that Iran's nuclear ambitions present a crisis of the first order, you simply cannot sit out the race or do other than work for Senator McCain and indeed contribute to his campaign.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's bullbleep.  Show me the evidence that "Mr. Bipartisanship" will take on a partisan war against the huge, filibuster- and perhaps veto-proof Democrat congressional majority that will emerge from the 2008 election that will be even more determined to surrender Iraq and Afghanistan to al Qaeda and Iran/Syria.  Show me the evidence that "Senator Comity" has EVER challenged the Democrats on ANYTHING over the past decade.  I can show you all kinds of examples of the Dark Lord of the Sith partnering with "good, close, personal friends" like Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, and Joe Lieberman.  And "Sailor" contemplating becoming John Kerry's 2004 running mate.  And the "Arizona maverick"'s stubborn, profane obsession with gutting any and all attempts at bolstering homeland security via his open-borders campaign and his "anti-torture" crusade.  He also echoes many aspects of Donk foreign policy, particularly the tiresome lefty mantra of "rebuilding our image in the world," as though national security was a popularity contest.

The evidence is beyond preponderant.  A President McCain would take his orders from "Crazy Nancy" Pelosi and "Dirty Harry" Reid.  They'll have the numbers to pass binding legislation requiring a full-scale retreat from the Middle East, and he would not challenge them.  Period.

Consequently, the lone reed on which McCainiacs and their "Stockholm Syndromists" like Praetor Hewitt are precariously leaning - "Conservatives have to back McCain because of the war" - is functional wet spaghetti.  Congressional Democrats will force our defeat starting next year, or perhaps even sooner.  The only difference between McCain, Rodham, and Obama is that the latter two will lead the charge, while the former will passively submit to it - at best.

That clearly isn't what once and current McCainiacs like Joseph Timothy Cook - whose pro-McCain rant Hugh quotes in its entirety - want to hear.  Cook even goes so far as to question the patriotism of those of us who refuse to be suckered again by Darth Queeg and claim that we're not really standing on principle but merely indulging in puerile petulance, even as he acknowledges chapter and verse all of McCain's heresies and double-crosses which make up the core of why he cannot be trusted.

That, and not Senator McCain "not being conservative enough", is the fulcrum issue: trust.  I will freely admit that while I could tolerate a Lincoln Chafee or Jim Jeffords in the U.S. Senate, I could never have supported such flagrant RINOs for president had they ever managed to slither into the GOP nomination.  But I don't think that such men would ever have pretended to be conservatives; they'd have run as "moderates".  I'd add that that is part and parcel of why they'd never have captured the nomination, but for the fact that John McCain succeeded, while having an even bigger impediment to overcome.

It's true that McCain isn't conservative; it's also true that he's gone out of his way to trumpet that fact, to become the Enemy Media's favorite Republican precisely because of all his betrayals, to do everything short of formally changing his party affiliation and walking across the aisle to join the Democrats.  He has done more to sabotage and damage the Republican Party in this decade than the entire Democrat caucus in both houses put together.  He was single-handedly responsible for costing the GOP its Senate majority in 2006 with his "Gang of 14"/ "memo of understanding" caper.  If he isn't a Donk mole in the Republican Party's highest echelons, he might as well be.

John McCain is a RINO belatedly pretending to be a conservative in order to hornswaggle the 70% of the base that didn't vote to nominate him.  He cannot be trusted on the economy, or shrinking government, or lowering taxes, or cutting federal spending, or reclaiming the federal judiciary from the left-wing oligarchists.  The only thing he can be trusted to do if elected is run and join the other side on issue after issue.  Why, in light of all of the above, would the war be any different?

Rhetorical question - it wouldn't be.  Cook is wrong when he says, "Neither [Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama] will fight the war. John McCain will."  No, he won't; he'll cut and run to the Democrats' appeasnik/defeatist position, because that's what he's done on every other issue ever since he developed presidential ambitions.  That's the only thing John McCain can be trusted to do.  Whether you like it or not - and I certainly don't - that's the truth.

The reality conservatives have to understand is that there will be two Democrat tickets on the ballot in November - one with a "D" after the name and one with an "R".  Two tax-raising tickets, two judicial imperializing tickets, two government-growing tickets, and two retreat & defeat tickets.  I will not delude myself into contributing my vote to either of them, and neither should Hugh Hewitt, Joseph Timothy Cook, or any other conservative.

Not that the right-wing pretenders, or Darth Queeg himself, will make it easy for us.  Indeed, in part of his Thursday column, Double-H does speak the truth:

John McCain will talk about the wide war and the dangers our enemies pose. He will do so every day all day, and every headline from the world that underscores the plans and attacks of the jihadists will be an exhibit in his appeal for support.

McCain will talk about the war because he will spend the next eight months trying to fool the Right into believing he's the lesser of two evils.  He can't talk about anything else because his Senate record differs little, if at all, from that of Senators Rodham or Obama.

Hillary and/or B.O. will talk about health care and the economy and all things domestic because those are the issues that voters care about this cycle.  The 2006 midterms confirmed that in the minds of most Americans, the war is over, and 9/11 is ancient history.  Barring another major attack here at home (or Iran launching an all-out WMD attack against Israel and our forces in Iraq) between now and November, McCain obsessing on the war will only succeed in making him more unpopular (and more easily tied to President Bush), seem more "out of touch" and less relevant, erode his "mythical middle" core of support, without making up any significant ground amongst the Republican base that would, with any other GOP candidate, be his bread & butter.

Figure in "Sailor's" campaign finance woes and the growing likelihood that he'll be extremely strapped for cash between now and the Republican convention in September while the ebony JFK has raked in ninety million dollars in the first two months of 2008, and it won't matter how he tries to package, or re-package himself, or how much or little he emphasizes the war: liberals and independents will flock to the Democrat banner, and conservatives - those who keep both feet anchored in reality, anyway - will avoid him like flesh-eating bacteria.  The result will be an electoral disaster - just as Hugh Hewitt predicted right up until Mitt Romney quit the race and endorsed McCain.

That's the biggest irony of all.  This intra-right-wing "argument" is more academic than practical.  Conservatives switching off their brains and taking Hugh's hackish, foolhardy advice will only limit the magnitude of the landslide, not turn its tsunami-eque tide.  That was going to be the case no matter which poor bastard the GOP offered up for ballot box butchering.

I've always subscribed to the adage that if you're going to go down, it's best to go down fighting with everything you've got.  Leave everything on the field of battle.  At least that way you know you've done your best, and are losing with no excuses or regrets.

Instead, the Republican Party is going to go down, from top to bottom, with not just its absolute worst, but with a man at the top of the ticket who hasn't been a bona fide Republican in this century.

There's a business expression for that sort of thing: "hostile takeover".

Double-H characterizes the Rodham/Obama vs. McCain race as "hope versus reality".  The reality that he is ducking, though, is that conservatives have no hope - and no choice, but to sit out a presidential election that, to borrow a Spockian aphorism, "makes no difference because there IS no difference."