You can always find out that you've won the debate on substance the moment lefties start tossing about a single word. It's also a great way to identify closet lefties. It's the word they use, like a panic button, like a political version of the military call for aid: 'Broken Arrow'. It's the single most insidiously demonic ploy they use, and they use it because it appeals to emotion, and thus works very well. That word is "hate."

If you state your reasoned opposition to affirmative action, correctly identifying the notions behind it as mere continuations of the racism, you are told "You just hate minorities and women." End of argument, game over, you lose, pack your bags, and shut up. There's no winning now, because your opponents have bypassed the brains of your audience in a sick appeal to their base instincts.

If you state your reasoned support for a more aggressive stance toward Islamic terrorists, and support your case with facts, historical precedent, and anything else, you are told: "You just hate all muslims." Game over, shut off the lights, debate dismissed, get out of town. There's no winning now, since your opponent has again stymied reason by going directly for that loser's panic button: Emotional response.

If you state your logical opposition to Senator McCain's presidential bid, explaining at length the sell-outs to principle and to good government, on a variety of issues that the Senator has supported to the detriment of these causes, your leftist opponent will simply state, with dripping venomous dishonesty: "You just HATE senator McCain." Game over. End of story, you suck, you hating monster, no sense listening to you or your rational complaints, you just hate the senator, irrespective of the fact that his actions are detestable to conservatives, without further reference to the facts of his actions, you are done here, Mister.

Once again, you've been shut down by that most emotional appeal of all, the idea that you hate Senator McCain. It couldn't possibly be that you merely hate the things he's done. It couldn't possibly be that you hate the notions of governance he's advocated. There's no way your hate is merely directed at his actual political positions. No, you just "hate" Senator McCain.

Notice, however, that you're no longer aware of the substance of the debate, but instead, merely the charge of "hate" against his opponents. They may indeed be exhibiting hate, but why would they hate John McCain? Why would they hate muslims? Or minorities? No, that's never explained. The fact that you have no reason to "hate" any of these in some actual, purposeful, personal way is never mentioned. Just the hate. What they leave out is that these alleged victims of your hate are merely the straw men they erect: Nobody HATES John McCain, or muslims, or minorities. Well, maybe a few loose canons... But they do hate the things, the issues, John McCain supports, and it has nothing to do with hate. It has everything to do with reason, logic, consistency, and philosophy.

When you see these vermin using the 'hate' weapon, you can know you're being confronted by con-men appealing to your emotions. I hate that. So should you.

If there's a single over-arching message John McCain learned from his 2000 campaign, it is that in a two man race, no Republican can win the nomination as well as the general election without the support of the Christian Conservatives. McCain is no fool, and being an old Washington hand, he doesn't miss a trick. The only way for McCain to win the Republican nomination in light of his 2000 debacle with respect to Christians is to neutralize them, to divide them and conquer them. To do this, McCain needed a shill. Enter Mike Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee, who governed as a liberal, is in favor of open borders, and like McCain(and Perry and Scwarzeneggar and Crist and Guliani) is an advocate for the former Mexican president, Vincente Fox. Huckabee has been talking in code throughout this campaign, frequently quoting the Bible, even in contexts where the quote didn't fit, and speaking of his belief that the earth is 6,000 years old. His intended audience has been the Christian conservatives, with the sole purpose of stealing their votes from Romney.

Interestingly, polling data strongly suggests that if Huckabee gets out of the race, even as late as Monday the 4th, before "Super Tuesday," most of Huckabee's supporters would swing with rapid near-certainty to Mitt Romney. Christians may have a problem with Romney's mormonism, but they have an even more thorough problem with John McCain. In any case, they would tend to favor Romney, because while not an evangelical Christian, he is at the very least a man committed, by all appearances, to his faith. That garners grudging respect from Christian conservatives. McCain, by contrast, has so damaged Christian conservatives that they would only support him in a worst case scenario.

So you see, it is critical to McCain, in order to win the nomination, to marginalize and divide the Christian wing of the Republican party. As I said, her comes Mike Huckabee, a man who has many sympathies with John McCain, a man who has governed from a point of view much more like McCain's policy positions than the Christian conservative into which Huckabee has morphed. Why then, would Huckabee set out to be a spoiler for McCain? What could be his motive?

The answer is simple, and it comes down to that oldest of political phenomena, the quid pro quo. Huckabee may be trying to secure for himself the Vice Presidential nod in a McCain campaign. More, the roster of Republican governors, those listed above, rushing to the microphone to endorse McCain, are after the same thing. They want something, and you can bet they've secured it before they speak. In the case of Huckabee, his treason to Christian conservatives may be the greatest political sell-out of all times, all in the name of his patron John McCain.

Markamerica

Next time: McCain's Mexican sell-out

Make no mistake: If John McCain becomes the nominee of the Republican Party, that party will be dead, as you have known it. The party coalition is already groaning under the weight of the contradictions destroying it. On one side, you have the party's root and core, the conservatives, who combined to form the winning coalition that gave rise to Ronald Reagan.  McCain is the enemy of all of those principals; the religious conservatives; the fiscal conservatives; the cultural conservatives; the rational conservatives; the libertarian conservatives.

I will not here address the issue of the particulars of McCain's treasons, his mutinies against the party, since I am not a party man. I will not bore you with a restatement of his abandonment of conservative principles; you cannot abandon that which you had never adopted as your own. Instead, let's imagine the future of Republicans should McCain not only win the party's nomination, but also the presidency. While I doubt that he can beat either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, the truth is that he might pull it off, and if he did, this is what we would get:

We would get a continuation of the faltering War on Terror. The greatest failure of the Bush presidency is his failure to be conservative enough. Rather than push the Saudis, the Syrians, the Pakistanis, and the other various ne'er-do-wells in the region, he has caved to expediency and accepted whatever help they offer, publicly, while they continue behind the scenes to pander to the radical islamists.  Rather than root out Osama bin Laden, wherever he goes, Bush has left us with a continual pursuit that never catches up with its target. McCain will similarly chase his tail.

We would continue the Iraq policy 'as is.'  I cannot stress enough, that this is among the greatest failures of the Bush administration: If the case for invading Iraq were fully justified, and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power an imperative, when did we inherit the mission creep resulting in "nation-building?" A conservative president doesn't engage in building any nation but his own. Instead, because Saddam slipped away, we fell into a protracted post-invasion occupation, and from there into nation-building. The duty of a President is to 'take out' those who are the enemies of the United States.  It is not to rebuild the countries that allow such dictators to rise. McCain will continue these failed policies. He too, sadly, is a nation-builder.

We will get increasingly liberal judges. McCain's animosity toward conservatives on the bench, demonstrated by his shocking anti-Alito remarks, merely tells a tale we already knew: John McCain is hostile to conservatives. He is hostile to the Constitution. Should he become President of the United States, you can expect more of the same.

We will continue our policy of open borders and North American integration under a McCain presidency. The head of his campaign's "Hispanic Outreach" program is a "Mexico First" advocate. Expect the borders to remain wide open. Expect the dimunition of American sovereignty to continue.

We will radically advance the notion of environmental protection in pursuit of the Kyoto Protocol. John McCain is on the Anthropogenic Global Warming bandwagon, and he has no intention of pulling back, since he is a press-hound, and notices what adoration Al Gore receives for his pet issue.  More, since McCain is ignorant of most anything of substance, he does not understand science, and does not conceive, therefore, the obvious fallacies in the Global Warming thesis.

We will continue to see a restriction of free speech for conservatives and libertarians who criticize the left. Since McCain is a center-left kind of guy, and his hostility to the right is legendary, it is certain he will seek to have Congress enhance McCain-Feingold, an act of law that has damaged the conservative movement in increasingly obvious ways.

We can expect that McCain will raise taxes, and otherwise do untold damage to the American economy. He claims to be a budget hawk, but in truth, it is a one-way view of budget shortfalls: He opposes spending cuts and serious approaches to entitlement reform, and always opts for tax increases, or at least, opposes tax cuts. Since he does not really understand economics, any better than he understands any other science, he is quick to point out that Phil Gramm will run his economic policies. Well whoop-dee-doo! We have a candidate who admits he knows nothing about one of the most critical issues in our nation, and we should accept on faith that he'll bring in Phil Gramm to solve it?

In point of fact, in every issue that matters to the future of this country, John McCain isn't merely wrong, but tragically, sadly ignorant. For that reason alone, a McCain presidency promises to be a disaster, but then there is this last reason, above the rest:

John McCain is not a conservative. Because he's not a conservative, but attempts to carry that mantle, and because the press largely allows him to get away with this subterfuge, conservatism itself will get the blame, just as it has gotten the blame for eight years of George W. Bush's un-conservative positions. The name 'conservative' will be ruined for another generation, and we will be left with a country descending into absolute, unfettered statism. Think of it. Consider this particular ramification of a McCain presidency. He will be every bit as much a failure, but he will be governing as a center-left guy, and since he's gotten away with passing himself off as a conservative, conservatism will get the blame.

It would be better for the Republican party, and certainly for the conservative movement, that either Democrat candidate is victorious in November. Letting McCain sully the name of conservatism, when he's barely a Republican, is the worst thing, and the last thing this nation can now afford.

Markamerica