Posted by
Markamerica on Friday, February 01, 2008 4:00:48 PM
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