Yeah, right.
Posted on 09/05/2008 5:08:53 AM PDT by sirchtruth
John MCain intoned some things in his speech last night conservatives need to be very weary of. His tone and talk about "not working for any party" was a little shot at republicans and conservatives alike. We all understand McCain is not a conservative, but he is within the party and if he doesn't think conservatives and the republican party work for the people of this county then he needs to be kicked out of this party!
Partisanship is a boon to this country. You have to argue vehemently to get your points across and hopefully convince a majority of people to your side. Why does McCain use the bogus line of people not wanting any partisanship when he knows it a lie perpetrated by the press for liberals and the democrats?
We can not have the perceived party head treat republicans like they are part of the problem in this country. However, that is exactly the tone McCain used in last night's speech. I don't appreciate it one bit and he better understand, this "maverick" moniker which has been foisted upon him and he readily accepts it is not good for our party.
It was a brilliant move for him to pick Palin as his runnig mate, but he might as well have picked Hillary or Lieberman after what I heard last night. Conservatives and conservative values are needed for this country and John, if you don't want to fight for them, I want you out of my party!
Not surprising. I have printed on other threads that I am voting for Palin and not McCain...McCain just happens to be on the ticket. Go Palin!!!! Can’t wait for the next four years to be over so we can have a real President!!! I am sick and tired of McCain’s liberalism with immagration (he talks but does not walk the walk)...his Global Warming nonsense. His against Bush taxes before he was for them. Thank God I have a candidate to vote for this year FINALLY!
Nothing new.
We all understand McCain is not a conservative, but he is within the party and if he doesn't think conservatives and the republican party work for the people of this county then he needs to be kicked out of this party!
It was the Republican Party that gave us Juan as the nominee even though there were much better people running (go Tancredo!).
The Republican Party has squandered its credibility and now has to earn back the respect of people like me.
We need 535 Sarah Palins in the Congress. That would be a great start.
He mentioned that in the context of vetoing bills filled with pork. I don't have a problem with McCain vetoing bills filled with pork regardless of if it's Democratic or Republican pork. Do you?
He is who he is. I’d rather he’d give the “straight talk” and not be like George H.W. “Read My Lips” Bush. The selection of Palin doesn’t change his laundry list of views, which doesn’t seem to be rooted in any consistent or orderly view of the things. It does mean that he recognizes the importance of taking us seriously, and he may genuinely value the fact that she doesn’t agree with him on various issues, but comes clean about it.
Both believe in good government, a healthy defense and by comparison with the dems, decent cultural values. Palin will also make sure her voice is heard.
Even Rush Limbaugh (during his McCain criticism phase) said in an interview with somebody that McCain cannot change his identity now.
I can't stand that immaturity about him! It's in no way Presidential.
He better keep being smart and jump on Sarah's bandwagon! I think he, once agian, set himself back when he could have steamrolled ahead on strong conservative point, instead of his STUPID "partisan" remarks!
McCain did fine.
You’re wrong. McCain’s speech was all Reagan.
His speech was a wake up call to the GOP.
Republicans lost the confidence of the voters — including all of us — because of their run away spending, corruption, and abandonment of the conservative principles which swept them into office. They ceased being the reformers of the Gingrich Revolution and broke their Contract with America in favor of becoming the pork-ladened entrenched interests.
John McCain was’nt afraid to say the emperor has no clothes. He didn’t say Republicans lost in 2006 because voters abandoned conservatism, he said Republicans lost because Republicans did.
All Republicans ignore McCain’s wake up call at their own peril.
Country first. People are sick of cheap shot partisanship. John McCain is right!
I want President McCain to veto spending bills and hold Oval Office speeches citing specific wasteful spending projects and NAMING NAMES. You and I have to make tough choices about spending our money, why should we settle for less than that in Washington?
I only watched about 30 seconds of the speech and caught him saying he would reach across the aisle. So did I just get “Lucky” or did he repeat the RINO mantra all night?
agree with you 100%
Oh, really? He pushes a few issues that are anathema to conservatives, but one cannot really argue that he is not a conservative. It's not certainly something that "we all understand." Sorry your RINO lost his primary bid, but please get over it.His tone and talk about "not working for any party" was a little shot at republicans and conservatives alike.
Have you been paying attention to national politics? Are you aware of the well-deserved scorn that, for instance, the GOP congressional delegation has earned by breaking from principles of fiscal and government responsibility? We can not have the perceived party head treat republicans like they are part of the problem in this country.
Sorry to say it, but the GOP "brand" is pretty tarnished right now. If you want the GOP to survive and regain the reputation it enjoyed as the part of budget hawks and adults, it is proper and very smart to say, "enough is enough."
It was the same old McCain advocating the same old ‘reforms’.
When McCain does ‘reform’ [Campaign Finance Reform,
Comprehensive Immigration Reform], America suffers.
Many are going to vote for the same ole and expect a different result. It ain’t gonna happen.
[Maybe we can hope that McCain-Palin does win, but Providence gives Palin a promotion in the not too distant future.]
We just have to be vigilant.
And when McCain tries, like GW, to push Amnesty for Illegals — and he will try — we just have to be ready, again, to flood Washington with phone calls and faxes and bricks for the fence and letters.
So? It was still a point about him thinking he's some maverick. Do you really think any politition is going to say they accept "pork" in a bill?
Anyway it doesn't matter it came off bad, real bad! I want the Republican party to win with or without McCain, but conservatives better understand what we're getting, a backstabbing conservative, liberal coddling rino!
And, your point? McCain is who he is. He is a maverick who plays both sides against the middle to accomplish his goals.
His brilliant selection of Gov. Palin doesn't signal a sea change or a paradigm shift for him; just political astuteness. As he told CPAC, to win, he must have the conservative vote. His selection of Gov. Palin as his VP assures that. His politics remain unchanged; this leopard has NOT changed his spots.
He had 6 out of 60 something paragraphs related to it. That was all.
John didn’t say anything surprising or necessarily horrible. It is amazing, the Hillary Clinton Forums are giving him more respect than some Freepers.
I’m tired of the Washington partisan rancor. If John can get the Democrats to work with us, while still being a social and fiscal conservative, I have no problem with working with the Dems.
WASHINGTON is broken is what he said. One news outlet claims that he said he was going to reform the Republican party. That isn’t what he said. He said Washington is broken, and he is the man to fix it.
I think we’re on the same page. I don’t disagree with anything you said. I know republicans turned the conservative leadership into rino central the last ten years. So that has to change! I don’t think it will with McCain at the helm.
Yeah, another line that bothered me big time. When John reaches across the aisle he usually forms "gangs."
Thank you.
Sadly there are a lot of people here and in the Washington GOP elite who will just never get it.
I only hope that they do not drag the rest of us down in November.
Seriously, the left’s policies are damaging, if not just downright evil.
Why “reach across the aisle” unless it’s to slap the dickens out of someone that needs it?
But at other times, I heard the FURTHEST THING FROM REAGAN.
McCain is pro-military, pro-life, fiscally conservative and supports the 2nd Amendment. That covers my hot buttons.
If he follows through on his pledge to reduce the size of government, I'll be thrilled.
I expect John McCain to reach across the aisle as President, where Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will bite his hand. But then McCain will have the high moral ground (which I believe is his motive).
Are you so guilliable you think John McCain can do this when everytime he's tried he's always sided on the liberals side????
What the hell do you think McCain/Kennedy, McCain/Lieberman, Campaign Finance Reform, is all about!? These are John McCain flushing conservative values down the John!
I want everyone to understand this: I want McCain/Palin to win this election. I think McCain would actually be a good President, except I don't think he's going to govern conservatively, and that's a huge problem for the republican party. We can't afford rino's running this party. If we keep voting for rino's the GOP/RNC will keep putting them up for us to vote for and it could be wholly detrimental to our country.
Also I heard allot of people calling in who did not know the details of his time in the POW camp, or that his Dad was an Admiral and Grandfather was a General.
I wasn’t overly happy with it either, but I was flamed and told to go vote for Bambi then.
I am not going to ever fool myself about McCain. The clowns he had on stage before his speech, like Linseed, were a very grim reminder. McCain would do well to buy those guys a free vacation for while.
I will vote for Palin, but I am wary as to whether she will get much influence in the end.
Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think that there's a lot more to the Palin selection than people are talking about. Yes, it's about the base. Yes, it's a tactical move that takes direct aim at the Snob's lack of accomplishment and at the Snob's buffoonish VP selection. And, yes, it's about tapping into disgust in the center and within some Democrat circles over the treatment of Hillary. But I think that there's a larger intent in her selection - and something the pundits don't seem to have thought about: he intends to take the GOP's Congressional delegation to the woodshed. Given her history, Palin is the perfect tool for that. McCain claims to not work for the party, but a revitalized party will be the end result, if he can turn them away from their recent pork addiction.
I don't argue against this, and you know it! I argue against John McCain coddling liberals and their talking points. I vehemently argue against John McCain's record of undercutting conservatives and conservative values!
I have said previously, I don't believe McCain knows exactly what he's gotten himself into w/ Palin. He has said a couple of times now Palin is not the type to "sit down" when told. I think there will be a lot of that going on, lol.
However, in contrast to the marxist that the democRATS have presented, he stands extremely tall.
Prior to Sarah Palin, I was going to reluctantly vote for him solely to keep Zerobama out. Now, with Sarah on board, I'm certainly more positive about voting for him.
This is where John McCain fails miserably. You can not reach across the aisle to people who do not share your "American Idea values". Do you remember he said something to the effect of, "America, is the "idea" I was fighting for."
He's correct, but he lost sight of what this "idea" really means in the political arena. Everytime he's tried to reach across the aisle it's been nothing but, Liberal Ideas Anit-american forwarded. He doesn't understand reaching across the aisle to get liberals to come over to your conservative, republican side, not to go to wholeheartedly to theirs!
bttt
And John McCain mentioned no such thing last night and you know it. If you want to take the vetoing of pork spending bills out of context, then fine, but that it your doing, not McCain's.
I believe Sarah will be an excellent tempering influence on him in both the immigration and global warming categories. She will point out the facts and he will listen to her because he will realize he couldn’t have gotten elected without her. He’s not stupid.
All I heard were repeated variations on the bi-partisan theme. I'm sure there isn't a person reading this that doesn't know that when you sit down to reach a compromise with evil, evil wins half of what it wants, and the other half comes later.
Am I the only one that noticed the absolute absence of the word "Republican" in the hall the past three days? The placards distributed to the delegates and waved around had no little elephant symbols tucked away in corners. No banners, nothing on stage with the word "Republican" on it.
The only indication that this was a convention of a particular political party was a couple of delegates with elephant hats.
This would be a real clue to a forensic scientist studying the gradual watering-down of the IDENTITY of a political party.
I'll be watching with keen interest the McCain campaign ahead and whether it will carry an identify of "Republican" or "Generic".
Leni
You and I both know McCain made that statement to make it seem as though republicans and liberals don't act any differently. Well, if that's what he thinks, and that's the way he wants to portray his party then he can go pound sand with his liberal coddling agenda!
Surrounding himself w/ Palin is certainly a good start. Only time will tell the rest.
You mentioning "tone" brings to mind an aggravating aspect of McCain's speech, which is the tone of his voice sounding like it belongs to a character in a kid's puppet show.
That's not how I perceived it. His speech was not as effective as Palin's, but I didn't expect it to be. (Palin's speech would be hard to beat.) However it did have several good moments. His charge to "Fight with me! ..." was an effective battle cry to Republicans, and any one else who thinks we need the right kind of change in Washington, rather than change for the sake of change.
I think the author has characterized McCain's words about partisanship wrongly. I don't think I have ever seen a politician more willing to take on his opponents than John McCain (or now Sarah Palin), and I think in him we will finally have a President who will not stand by and let the liberals and media (same thing, I know) smear him and his partners without seeing an effort to fight back. (That is my biggest complaint about President Bush.)
But there is a kind of partisanship that is not productive, and that is from my point of view what McCain was attacking. Democrats are often guilty of this kind of partisanship, but Republican have been guilty of it too at times.
This kind of partisanship is the kind that puts the party above principle and results in much evil. For example this is the kind of partisanship that cost many Republicans their jobs in 2006, i.e., the idea that we have to spend more government money to be re-elected. It also turns a blind eye to corruption within one's own party, and exaggerates corruption among others. Not only that it takes policy differences and treats them as criminal issues.
That kind of partisanship is harmful to the country; even un-American. And Democrats are especially guilty of it. It hasn't always been like that in our country, but since Robert Bork, it has become increasingly and increasingly more evident in Washington.
John's McCain's condemnation of that kind of partisanship is especially an indictment against Democrat leaders (and the DU), but also against Republicans who act the same way. Far from saying that we shouldn't fight against our Democratic opponents, McCain's speech was a blow against the way Democrats have damaged political debate, and so a part of the fight we all should wage.
I know that there will be many times that I will disagree with McCain on the issues, and when that happens I hope someone in Washington will stand and fight against President McCain, and either change his mind, or defeat him in those misguided acts. But I hope it will be done on the merits rather than through personal attacks.
Partisanship has weakened America since the beginning of the current World War, and we can all do with more unity of spirit if not in ideas.
As fopr the other issues, Palin can try to keep him on the reservation. And if, God forbid, anything happens to him, she is the first woman so attuned to my politics that I would LOVE her as president.
It was a conservative speech. If Bush and his Congress spent money like drunken sailors, and McCain apologized for it, I can’t call that “not conservative”. School choice is certainly a conservative issue, and he featured that. He didn’t mention amnesty for illegal aliens, although we all know that he plans to do it. On the whole I thought it was a good speech.
I don't know about that. I have been pleasantly pleased with the way McCain and his team have fought for the presidency since he secured the nomination. Most of his commercials have been effective, and all of his actions have been well timed.
I have always doubted claims of timing that are sometimes made for or against a candidate when things happen a a seemingly opportune time, but McCain's seems to really plan these things for maximum effect. Announcing Sarah Palin the morning after Obama's speech and convention was a masterful stroke to dampen Obama's bounce.
McCain likes Lieberman, but I wonder how long it took him to rule him out as a potential VP pick. I can see all the suspense that existed before last Friday's announcement made many think (including the Obama camp) that McCain very well might make a stupid choice, or at best a nothing choice, and that kept the Democrats complacent.
In that background the Sarah Palin pick was a huge surprise. It couldn't have been better if it has been done on purpose, and maybe, just maybe, it was.
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