Why media conservatives hate John McCain

One of the most frustrating aspects of this election season has been the willingness of our allies in the conservative media to outsmart themselves by supporting liberal Republicans. Some of them latched on to one of these "moderates" from day one. The most egregious example of this tendency is Sean Hannity, who must feel a bit foolish for his slavish promotion of Giuliani, given Rudy's inglorious performance at the polls.

Hugh Hewitt also gets raspberries for becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Romney, Inc. One wonders if the FEC will be investigating Hewitt for all the free advertising he has given the Republican version of John Kerry. Personally, I'm more than a little insulted by Hewitt's shameless pumping of liberal Mitt under a micro-thin pretense of impartiality. I hope his audience share has suffered accordingly.

Other hosts, not nearly so audacious in their error (Rush Limbaugh most predominant among them), withheld their support from good conservative candidates until it was too late to do much good.

So now three weak sisters remain, with John McCain appearing as the most likely to limp to the nomination. Yet somehow, someway, the media conservatives have decided to rally around Mitt Romney who is perhaps the most liberal of the remaining three in terms of his record. With the sole exception of Michael Medved who, after a worrisome start, has been a level-headed, equal-access paragon of Republican impartiality throughout this extended campaign, the vast majority of media conservatives are now going after McCain hammer and tongs.

Which brings me to a quesiton that's been haunting me for the past month: What's so bad about John McCain that the supposed lights of the conservative movement would rather support a pandering, phony, northeastern liberal like Mitt Romney? I'm no fan of McCain, myself. Indeed, I've called him just about every name in the book over the past eight years. But at least with McCain, you know what you're getting and we can gear up for a serious fight after he gets elected.

With Romney, the GOP base is likely to be lulled into a false sense of security--until he goes Arlen Specter on us. Mitt had a strange propensity in Massachusetts to allow liberalism to advance on all fronts--and help it from behind the scenes--while putting on a dog-and-pony show of opposition. A crypto-liberal like Romney in the White House would be infinitely more dangerous to conservative causes than a mushy moderate like McCain. And given what has happened to the GOP in Massachusetts post-Romney, conservatives could be looking at another 40 years in the wilderness following a Romney term.

So why are these intelligent, plugged-in media conservatives willing to get on board the Romney bandwagon and reject McCain with extreme prejudice? It has to be more than mere political differences. Here's a theory that popped into my head to explain this phenomenon: the animus displayed by media conservatives toward McCain comes not from any true ideological difference, but mainly from fear that McCain would threaten their livelihood.

Last night, I got a bit of confirmation of this theory. A talkshow host who frequents a major forum posted the following:

Bush signed CFR, stupidly believing the SCOTUS would do its job and quash the thing, as it is so in the face of 1A that how could they not?

Well, they did, as government employees are wont to do.

W’s a rotten conservative, and I’ve said so many time here. I’ll also say this though: in comparison, any of the people running for the WH are going to make W look like Reagan, and probably like Churchill for his stand on the war.

The UK right now is LIVING this in the form of Gordon Brown. He’s the pasty, even more liberal, version of Barack Obama over there, and in less than a year he’s signed away the UK’s sovereignty, even to the point of removing the seal of the UK from the pound coin.

Our party was done in by Hastert, Frisk AND W. All the spending and the explosion in Gov’t.

I think Rush is doing the right thing and letting the party twist. As for the rest of them, they were pimps anyway. Hannity became to terrible to listen to about two years ago.

Rush, and Mark Levin (his recent endorsement of Romney notwithstanding) seem to be the only sane talkers left.

The way McCain handled the MIA/POW families in the years since that war ended makes me ill to no end... McCain is a Traitor in my book! For others on this forum who know not of what we speak, I'll post a section from one of your links that nails him as the hateful, lying, P.O.S. he truly is!

From the POW/MIA Hearings:

Confrontation with witness One such witness was Dolores Apodaca Alfond, chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families, an all-volunteer MIA organization. Her pilot brother, Capt. Victor J. Apodaca, out of the Air Force Academy, was shot down over Dong Hoi, North Vietnam, in the early evening of June 8, 1967. At least one person in the two-man plane survived. Beeper signals from a pilot's distress radio were picked up by overhead helicopters, but the cloud cover was too heavy to go in. Hanoi has recently turned over some bone fragments that are supposed to be Apodaca's. The Pentagon first declared the fragments to be animal bones. But now it is telling the family -- verbally -- that they came from the pilot. But the Pentagon, for unexplained reasons, will not put this in writing, which means Apodaca is still unaccounted for. Also the Pentagon refuses to give Alfond a sample of the fragments so she can have testing done by an independent laboratory.

Alfond's testimony, at a hearing of the POW/MIA committee Nov. 11, 1992, was revealing. She pleaded with the committee not to shut down in two months, as scheduled, because so much of its work was unfinished. Also, she was critical of the committee, and in particular Kerry and McCain, for having "discredited the overhead satellite symbol pictures, arguing there is no way to be sure that the [distress] symbols were made by U.S. POWs." She also criticized them for similarly discounting data from special sensors, shaped like a large spike with an electronic pod and an antenna, that were airdropped to stick in the ground along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

These devices served as motion detectors, picking up passing convoys and other military movements, but they also had rescue capabilities. Specifically, someone on the ground -- a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor detail -- could manually enter data into the sensor pods. Alfond said the data from the sensor spikes, which was regularly gathered by Air Force jets flying overhead, had showed that a person or persons on the ground had manually entered into the sensors -- as U.S. pilots had been trained to do -- "no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos."

Other than the panel's second co-chairman, Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., not a single committee member attended this public hearing. But McCain, having been advised of Alfond's testimony, suddenly rushed into the room to confront her. His face angry and his voice very loud, he accused her of making "allegations ... that are patently and totally false and deceptive." Making a fist, he shook his index finger at her and said she had insulted an emissary to Vietnam sent by President Bush. He said she had insulted other MIA families with her remarks. And then he said, through clenched teeth: "And I am sick and tired of you insulting mine and other people's [patriotism] who happen to have different views than yours."

Brought to tears By this time, tears were running down Alfond's cheeks. She reached into her handbag for a handkerchief. She tried to speak: "The family members have been waiting for years -- years! And now you're shutting down." He kept interrupting her. She tried to say, through tears, that she had issued no insults. He kept talking over her words. He said she was accusing him and others of "some conspiracy without proof, and some cover-up." She said she was merely seeking "some answers. That is what I am asking." He ripped into her for using the word "fiasco." She replied: "The fiasco was the people that stepped out and said we have written the end, the final chapter to Vietnam." "No one said that," he shouted. "No one said what you are saying they said, Ms. Alfond." And then, his face flaming pink, he stalked out of the room, to shouts of disfavor from members of the audience.

As with most of McCain's remarks to Alfond, the facts in his closing blast at her were incorrect. Less than three weeks earlier, on Oct. 23, 1992, in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President Bush -- with John McCain standing beside him -- said: "Today, finally, I am convinced that we can begin writing the last chapter in the Vietnam War."

The committee did indeed, as Alfond said they planned to do, shut down two months after the hearing.

'Cannot discuss it'

As for her description of the motion sensor evidence about prisoners in Laos, McCain's response at the hearing was that this data was in a 1974 report that the committee had read but was still classified, so "I cannot discuss it here. ... We hope to get it declassified."

Tragic! McCain is a man with no honor. Hero??? Not from what his fellow POWS say!

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