I’m with you. I can’t stand McCain, and I feel utterly abandoned. I hate knowing that no one is going to represent me on Illegal Aliens, the reality of Global Warmongering, and half of the other things that I think are absolutely vital. But this is going to be a choice of A or B, getting only half of what I want or getting none of what I want, and sitting out is going to result in the worst case. Further, sitting out is not going to “teach anybody a lesson, by gum”. The hard truth is that we as Conservatives have failed to make our case one person at a time to other voters, and we as a party have failed to put up candidates who live up to our values. We’ve ended up with too many RINOs in power because not enough of us have gone out and done the hard work to identify and get elected real conservatives who won’t end up embarrassing us in a men’s room somewhere or worse. Subjecting the country to four or eight years of Democrats packing even more Socialists and Communists into every available corner of the government is not going to advance our cause. I seriously considered sitting out, but I think we have to be grownups and do the best that is possible, while working harder for what we know is right. Take some heart from the knowledge that we did affect some decisions during the Bush Administration for the better. If it were not for the massive pressure from us, Harriet Miers would have been on the Supreme Court before you could say “Judge Souter and his gang stole my damn house”. Only the massive pressure from us has kept the Illegal Alien issue from becoming a wholesale concession to lawlessness. We haven’t won, but we haven’t given up, either. And we have won some significant battles. This is and will remain damn hard work. We have to do it, and not sulk off to suck our thumbs in the corner.
To the point, we should be flooding, and I mean flooding, the McCain headquarters with demands for a conservative VP like Hunter, Thompson, or someone even better.
Well said, your post #70.
The war is my bottom line. If any Dem were remotely trustworthy on the war, I’d happily sit this one out, as I threaten to do almost every day.
But they aren’t. I’ll vote for the candidate least likely to abandon what we’ve accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan. If his VP choice can be trusted to do the same, I’ll be fine with it.
I disagree with Rice on some issues. She represents a continuation of Bush’s foreign policy, for good and for bad, she has been in part the architect of those policies both good and bad. I detest McCain, and if I could in conscience sit it out, I would. But the Bush/Rice foreign policy, weak as it is in some areas, is light-years ahead of the DNC’s stated positions. Its light-years more grown-up than anything Clinton or Obama have put forward.
I haven’t seen any evidence that McCain will be significantly stronger than Bush (though I hope he will be), but I see evidence that he will be far stronger than anyone from the DNC. And I can hope, at least, that he will be stronger.
So, I’ll vote for him (well, thats my mood today, he hasn’t said anything in the last 24 hours to really wind me up) and that won’t change whoever his VP is, as long as that VP can also be trusted to prosecute the war.