Monday, February 04, 2008

GET A GRIP, PEOPLE

I realize I come to this discussion a little late, but the negativity is starting to get to me. SuperDuper Tuesday is not until tomorrow, and the convention is far from over. I'm not sure who I will vote for (and I've voiced my dismay at the options on all sides several times on this blog), but this lady says everything that I could possibly say on the issue of the McCain hysteria sweeping political right:
Let me get this straight: you’d rather have Hillary Clinton, a bona fide socialist, liar, all-around bad person, as president. You’d rather have Obama, the senator with the most liberal voting record, as president.

Really? I throw up my hands in disgust. I truly do.

I know some say that they’d rather “have the country ruined” by a real liberal than by a RINO. You know what that sounds like? Something you’d read on DailyKos. He’s not going to ruin the fucking country, y’all. At most he has 4 years to do whatever he does and I’m pretty sure recent experience proves that no matter how bad a president is, they can’t “ruin the country”.

He’s not going to socialize healthcare like Hillary or Obama would. He actually gives a shit about fighting the war against towelheads, unlike Hillary or Obama.


She then quotes Bill Whittle:
We’ve lost 4,500 soldiers fighting in Iraq. If you think I am going to sit back and let Hillary or Obama cut and run, and have those brave men and women die in vain, simply because I don’t like John McCain (and I most emphatically do not like John McCain), then you have another think coming.

Goddamn right.


The unbelievable paranoia, histrionics (even if we expect it from Ann Coulter) and bizarre conspiracy theories, coming from people I usually admire on the right these days is nothing short of mind-blowing and fully as deranged as anything that the lunatic left could come up with.

Come on people, GET A GRIP.

Is it really party purity über alles?
It’s that they have elevated party purity above considerations of the good of the country. In the end, not only is this bad for the country, but I think it’s bad for the Republican Party....

Candidates don’t win by ideological purity. That’s a delusion to which the extreme wings of both parties are subject.

But it turns out that for some, it’s not even about winning. It’s about party purification, about who owns the soul of the Republican Party.

There truly is something sickening about this reification of party purity over all. It’s a sort of fanaticism that doesn’t appeal to me whatever side it may be found on.


I agree. We have a real chance to keep the White House in 2008, and that chance is going to get lost if the sort of garbage going around about McCain is not taken out with all the rest of the trash we've come to expect from the left.

In fact, Victor Davis Hanson thinks that circumstances have combined to make a Republican win very possible:
It is understandable to lament the absence of conservative purity, but ahistorical to suggest that any recent Republican president would have met any of the litmus tests now demanded, given the dependency of the middle class on entitlements and its touchy-feely worldview.

Reagan, and Bush I and II all adjusted to that unfortunate reality. A Democrat did not appoint Souter, O’Connor, or Kennedy, nor raise payroll and gas taxes in the 1980s, nor sign amnesty and de facto open-border legislation in 1986, nor, later, increase federal spending well past the rate of inflation, or offer amnesty again in 2007. Tax cuts were great, but without caps on spending they were unfairly slurred as revenue reducers once deficits soared. Recent Republican congressional scandals mirror-imaged some of the Clinton-era roguery.

Reagan’s pragmatism on taxes, amnesty, new federal programs and government expansion, was continued by both Bush I and II. In that regard, McCain seems a continuum, not an abject disconnect....

In short, anyone who saw the Democratic debate Thursday night can envision the new future on their horizon: identity politics and self-congratulation over race and gender; tax increases (back to estate tax hikes, income tax rates go up, payroll tax caps lifted, etc); internationalism for the sake of internationalism (defer to the U.N., E.U., apologies for past conduct, contextualizing terrorism), more government (teachers, the poor, the middle class, etc. all need new government programs to add to those we have), and legislating judges (more Ginsburgs and Breyers).

Given all of the above, I don’t think it’s in the interest of conservatives for much longer to worry about McCain’s class ranking at Annapolis or how many planes he was nearly killed in.


Given all the above, I think the right needs to take a few deep breaths and calm down and THINK--particularly if, after Super Tuesday, McCain breaks away completely from Romney. If that's the way the cookie crumbles, then at least deal with it like grown-ups and not like entitled, self-absorbed, spoiled brats we've come to know and love on the other side of the political spectrum. There's already a good percentage of them in that psychological category--and look at the damage they've managed to inflict with their neo-marxist ideological purity in the last few decades.

Keep in mind, that if the NY Giants can win the Superbowl against the Patriots, then ANYTHING is possible on Super Tuesday; but if the "miracle" doesn't happen, and ideological purity is not achieved by the vote of the people, then deal with it.

UPDATE: Fred Barnes agrees.


More Cartoons by Bob Gorrell

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