No Positives in McCain’s CPAC Speech
I read John McCain’s CPAC speech, and I’m struggling to find the positives. Hugh Hewitt describes it as “superb” and Ed Morrissey says it was “excellent”. However, it strikes me as arrogant and condescending. In a nutshell, McCain will seek conservative “counsel”, but won’t change his mind unless he’s “convinced” his “judgment is in error”. And judging from his actions, he hasn’t found too many of those over the years. It won’t be long before he’s swearing at us and calling us “racists” again.
Sorry, folks, but one speech does not erase McCain’s history. I know some of you are desperately trying to put your fingers in the dike this election season. But if I was interested in supporting a good orator, I’d jump on the cult of Obama bandwagon. That’s his main qualification as far as I can tell.
Archived in: 2008 Election, Conservatives, Ed Morrissey, Hugh Hewitt, John McCain, Republican Party, Republican PrimaryFebruary 7, 2008 at 7:53 pm | Trackback
4 comments
Conservatives are beginning to amaze me in their inability to see what’s really at stake here.
This election is about more than McCain and his inability to follow conservative principals - although he has earned the angst of true conservatives.
But how is handing all three branches of our government over to far right liberals a suitable alternative to McCain?
There is a serious difference between McCain and a pure bread liberal who is bent on destroying ALL conservative values permanantly as well as our country with them.
Anti McCain commentators such as Rush Limbaugh have ventured the idea that perhaps we should sit this election out and let the Dems have a term in office, claiming it might pave the way for a future shot at a candidate he and others will like in four years.
Imagine the damage our country will endure if Democrats control all three branches of government for 4 to 8 years.
This would give liberals what they will regard as a clear sign from America that is it ready to move sharply to the left. Not slightly to the left. It will be a flamingly liberal mandate we can’t play games with.
My daughters will come of age in the next 4 to 8 years, and I’d rather have 50% of McCains ear than 0% of a destruction bent liberal’s ear.
Cherry picking our candidate is exactly what got us INTO this mess, and if conservatives aren’t careful, they may throw the entire country into a liberal spin that can take a decade(s) to pull back out of.
There is no such thing as a quick recovery from 4 years of liberalism unchecked. We may be facing what will take years and years of damage to undo. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that it WILL be undone. Have conservatives completely forgotten Roe v. Wade and other extremely important issues? We need some sort of conservative edge on every core issue we can get.
Questioning McCain was right and highly useful for a time and a season. Many of us wish we had acted sooner to support Romney or Huck….
But staying home on election day allows liberals a pass to capture all THREE branches of Government. Do you want your kids growing up in “Slick Willie” on steroids environment?
I’m not asking anyone to sacrifice their own belief or convictions, but we have a serious problem here, that we can’t afford to fall asleep on.
Give it some thought, friends.
Danny Vice
http://weeklyvice.blogspot.com
http://thalunatic.blogspot.com
Who said sit out the election? Limbaugh didn’t.
The conservatives need to get out of the GOP. Form a third party AND run candidates for office.
The current GOP needs to trip and fall face down on the concrete with a serious set of abraded knees, hands and a bloody face resulting.
Specter, Grassley and Bush et al do nothing for us. They have been in office and are the problem; they prevent the solution. Let them go over to the dark side, if they can get elected as a Donk.
Rome did not create a great empire by getting along; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
It’s time for the sanguine solution.
“There is no such thing as a quick recovery from 4 years of liberalism unchecked. We may be facing what will take years and years of damage to undo.”
It has taken half a century of slow boiling to effectively concentrate conservative principles. Compassionate slap after slap after slap of the cheek was countered with a turn to the other cheek all these years.
I say let the beast roar…the damage done will only more deeply concentrate conservatism. My Governor, Governor Romney was your last best hope but his cheek was slapped too….by Republicans.
If your albatross is true remorse, the only option open as I see it is a full blown nation wide write in campaign for Mitt Romney.
Danny would persuade me if I believed that this is an ideological struggle. It isn’t. It’s a dispute within the political class itself, it’s not about beliefs, it’s about power and association. McCain isn’t a liberal OR and conservative, he’s radically pragmatic, which is worse than both. No one has the vision McCain claims to have on ANY issue. He’s always right, you see. Impossible.
Limbaugh, among others, completely misses this point, although Limbaugh employs an obsolete term to describe it - without actually understanding what he’s saying when he says it. He says that the “country-club, blue-blood Republicans” are struggling with the modest and sensible conservatives. That’s bullshit; there’s no other word for it.
The CCBBR’s disappeared with Henry Cabot Lodge, and Limbaugh reveals his populist prejudice at the same time that his conservatism enhances a certain kind of utilitarian snobbery. Amazing nothingness. This guy discovered conservatism they way some people discovered Marxism, at the gravesites of Goldwater and Marx, without having read the program or the obituary.
This confusion is what happens when a life philosophy - conservatism (not a political ideology) is left in the hands of pop culture hacks to define it. The blinkered idealism of the ’60’s ended in the same fatuities , ending up as a Peter Max poster and a Peter Sellers movie. We have the equivalent, too, of a Che sweatshirt in the hagiographic crap surrounding Ronald Reagan, and the “what would Reagan do?” idiocy. Hannity again.
Conservatism has no gods, no idols; it’s anti-ideological and anti-coercion. It can’t compete with liberalism because liberalism is about needs and wants, and conservatism is about liberty and its discontents.
Danny is advancing McCain by telling us what he isn’t, and with speculation about the world without him, which is not exactly a defintion of what McCain IS. The fact that McCain has even risen to this level proves that the conservatism of the thinkers is already mortally ill because of the schools, the talk-radio prattlers and because of James Madison.
Why Madison? He put together our system, the one that breaks and controls faction by commerce and the promotion of self-interest as the only good. Americans today, don’t give a damn about much of anything except easy security, material wealth and the good life. Liberalism flourishes in this ground. McCain is just a symptom of a larger problem.