Holding Your Nose, AKA the Lesser of Two Evils (Vanity)

[Ultra Sonic 007]

It boggles the mind.

First of all, it's only a few months after the 2006 elections ended, and we're already on the move towards the 2008 elections. I'm sorry, but doesn't Bush have two years left? A lot can change until then.

Secondly, let's look at some of the current frontrunners for the GOP.

Mitt Romney. John McCain. Rudy Giuliani.

Romney has flip-flopped on positions many times, so I wouldn't give him my vote. John McCain, despite his strong conservative rating from the ACU (lifetime of 83), he is partially responsibility for the travesty of McCain-Feingold, aka CFR. He is also a supporter of amnesty. Sorry.

Giuliani, although strong on national defense, is a devout Leftist. Pro-abortion. Pro-gun control. Pro-homosexual rights. He embraces illegal immigration. It stuns me that he has as large a following on Free Republic as he does.

There are far better candidates out there. Tom Tancredo (lifetime rating of 99). Sam Brownback (lifetime rating of 95). Duncan Hunter (lifetime rating of 92).

So why?

Why are so many going to hold their noses and compromise their beliefs? Name recognition? Why? It bewilders me.

We have Pro-Life candidates in Hunter, Brownback, and Tancredo. We have anti-illegal immigration and Pro-border control candidates in Hunter and Tancredo (this is where Brownback slips up; support for a guest worker program? Voted yes on allowing illegals access to Social Security? No thanks.). We have pro-second amendment candidates in all three (NRA gave Hunter an A+, and both Brownback and Tancredo an A). All three are supportive of the War on Terror.

So please. Tell me. Why not vote for any of these three (particularly Tancredo and Hunter; Brownback's position on immigration irks me)? Why not?

Who cares about name recognition at this point? It's 2007. November 2008 is a long way away. A lot can change between now and then.

I refuse to compromise on MY beliefs in this matter. I will not vote for a candidate who is socially no different from the socialists on the Left. Hanging up your hat at this point is akin to giving up.

Don't.

Vote for Hunter. Vote for Tancredo. Get the word out.

[don-o]

Parse it as you will. I do not care. No 'bort gets my vote.

[Jim Noble]

Image what would happen if the Southern/Reagan/Bluedog Democrats [who helped elect Reagan, for example] and the R-conservatives decided to work together for 08.

Reagan Democrats fear and loathe Dobsonites and Schiavo savers.

[Nuc1]

"So, we are left with his stated intention to appoint a certain type of judge. If he is true to his own stated position on Roe, I don't see how that bodes well for conservatives."

I can't fault your logic here. I believe any pubbie (well, most any) will be better by miles than any rat in the race now. Anyway, that is my two cents. I have empathy for your position on voting, however and the record of "trusting" presidents about their judicial appointments sure isn't good.

[Nuc1]

"There isn't a single good reason for me to vote for him, and a myriad of reasons I shouldn't."

I understand. Rudy is way down the trust curve. And so are McCain and Romney. I will not vote for any of them in the primary. I will however vote for the pubbie nominee over any rat currently in the field for the national election. Let's see how this develops. I think it will be interesting.

[Ultra Sonic 007]

What ping list?

[incredulous joe]

I feel your pain.

We still have a ways to go. Possibly one of these real conservatives may emerge; Hunter seemingly the person I would most favor.

I would have a very difficult time voting for someone that is pro-abort, however Guiliani appears to be saying all the right stuff and, unlike Romney, I actually beleive him.

Well, I ain't a pubbie - and after the last few years probably never would be - so, I'll have to let all the registered folk battle it out in the primaries and see what the GOP presents to us.

[lentulusgracchus]

You're blaming others for Gingrich's "personal destruction"?

Yes, I am. Major media campaign by the journopolemicists of the Left who recognized the threat Gingrich and Rush represented to their sacred socialism. Brent Bozell of Media Research Center (q.v.) wrote about the major campaign of personal destruction that the journos rained down on leading Republicans, concentrating on Rush and Newt, after the 1994 "revolution" which showed that conservatism, articulated with an agenda clearly spelled out, could compete with liberalism after all.

Bozell warned Republicans what was coming but, as he remarked ruefully later, they really couldn't get their minds around what they were about to go through, and they were less than effective in countering the negative PR the journos ginned up for them. Part of that negative redefinition of the GOP conservatives was the string of stories the Leftstream Media ran on Gingrich, such as........

I loved Gingrich until I realized he was a vile excuse for a human being. The way he treated his wife was unforgiveable.

I read those stories, too, and was told them with great heat and passion by former Reagan Democratic women who had their government paychecks cut off by Slick during the 1995 government "shutdown". Having their chains yanked by Slick gave them a "conversion experience" and they went from being Reagan admirers to Republican-haters in a flash. It was pure fear -- fear of ending up pushing a grocery cart and living under an overpass.

Until you've heard that story about Gingrich's divorce from someone who isn't MSM or a Democrat, you don't know what really happened. I say that in all candor, realizing that Gingrich may have behaved badly toward his first two wives. Politicians often do get full of themselves. But the Democrats were retailing dirt on him from the moment he became Speaker, and they went and got his lesbian sister to come out and tell stories out of school about him, too. They behaved exactly like Jerry Springer on a mission, and their stuff about Gingrich or Bill McCollum or Henry Hyde or anyone else they went after is about as credible as Springer's.

[lentulusgracchus]

Reagan Democrats fear and loathe Dobsonites and Schiavo savers.

I'm not sure that's true -- perhaps you have some insight or better information than I do, but it's my impression from personal contacts and discussions that the people who really fear Rev. Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and people like them are the very well-educated, modestly upscale (in their tastes, anyway) National Public Radio audience. Many are academics or connected with the academic life and society somehow, and many of them in particular are scientific materialists who have left middle-class religious experiences behind, who in college traded in their childhood catechism lessons for readings in literary criticism, philosophy, and history retold from a Marxian or materialist point-of-view.

[lentulusgracchus]

[Me] On the eve of the 1964 convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco that nominated the great Barry Goldwater

[You] How'd that work out?

Make your point.

We've got to settle for a gun-grabbing, aborting, Open Borders Lobby economic-royalist Yacht Club RiNO, right? That your point?

Here's my point. Hillary will come for you second, right after Rush and Newt. She and her ilk despise us conservatives, but they hate you.

So knock off the Yacht Club control games that you guys have been playing since before Wendell Willkie, since before "Dollar Mark" Hanna, or we'll just sit by and watch you get bundled off to concentration camps. Remember that your asses are really on the line this time, and think about some self-preservation.

Quit screwing with conservatives and telling us how unelectable we are, and how we have to crawl to you and beg for your wise help and far-seeing wisdom.

Conservative America isn't "flyover/screwover country" anymore.

[lentulusgracchus]

Please tell me what did conservatives in Congress do about all those gun control laws.

They're doing it in the State legislatures. Haven't you noticed all the ululation from the gun-grabbers about "shall-issue" legislation passing into law?

Rudy is not responsible for gun control.

But he would sign a new law, if business people came to him and told him they thought it was time to abolish the Second by federal statute and begin registering firearms for later confiscation.

(This isn't just fantasy, btw -- the Pew political sociology survey of 1999 showed very, very weak support for RKBA among business-oriented Republicans. Uneasy lies the head, et cetera. It isn't beyond practical politics at all, for the gun-grabbers to seek a rapprochement with the RiNO's that would give them a national "regifiscation" law.)

And if SCOTUS got a challenge to the Sullivan Act or the 1987 gun-control act with Giuliani in the White House, they'd "read the election returns" and uphold U.S. vs. Miller and repeal the Second themselves, by interpreting it out of existence as SCOTUS and Franklin Roosevelt tried to do in Miller.

A real conservative in the White House means the Solicitor General arguing a full-court press for 2A/RKBA before SCOTUS with the President's full backing. Think that wouldn't make a difference?

Or maybe you think all us conservative knuckle-draggers west of the Mississippi shouldn't own guns anyway. Bad for us, bad for society, et cetera et cetera.

Plus, Giuliani would never nominate a strict-constructionist to the Supreme Court. He'd put up a Bar Association favorite -- some trimmer or New York Bar Association past president from the First Circuit. A Hume idolater, a Hamiltonian like himself -- a Big Business Republican, a Bonesman, someone "above the salt". He would never on God's green earth nominate a Clarence Thomas or even a Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. We'd get nothing but Ginzburgs and Souters from Rudy. As witness his appointments in New York, all made with a weather eye toward their "political acceptability" (RiNOspeak for "will I get any heat from The New York Times over this appointment?").

And I can only imagine what his position on Open Borders and "North America"/supranational government would be like.

[Cyropaedia]

When was a movie star elected President?

I believe it was a movie star who had first been elected Governor of the nation's largest state.