I never liked MacCain’s political views but I’ve always considered him to be well meaning and honorable.
His refusal to endorse Sarah Palin is showing him to be disingenuous and petty.
My statement is not a subjective opinion, but rather the result of deductive reasoning. Four months ago he told the nation that Sarah Palin was the best person to serve as President of the United Sates of America in case he himself would be unable to fulfill that duty – assuming he won of course. Now he refuses to give her even a qualified endorsement.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXI1PGZEAxI]
Either he lied to us back then in order to win the election or he is lying to us now in order to avenge some perceived slight. One of the two must be true and it doesn’t matter which.
I have said all I wanted to say about McCain during the primaries, but I will not stand idly by while he denigrates a woman whose life and character he may have matched in his youth but now rises far above his own.
I wrestled with voting for McCain long and hard and had made up my mind to not do it. That is, until the Republicans pulled the most manipulative and Machiavellian move of nominating Sarah Palin.
It is perhaps the one main reason I despise the current RNC leadership. Don’t misunderstand. I consider Sarah Palin the embodiment of what the Republican party ought be. I was and still am disgusted with the Republicans for forcing me to vote for McCain in order to save Palin’s reputation.
There is nothing that the Kristol wing of the Republican party would have loved more than to discredit Palin and all that she stood for. We had therefore to vote for McCain in order to defeat the putrid Neocon cancer that ate at the conservative core of the party. I had to vote for McCain and on the list of why I now despise Neocons that ranks towards the top.
Below is a piece I wrote about him during the Republican primaries.
McCain the Uniter
The defeat of the elitist plan to turn America into little more than a cash cow to be milked by Mexico and other similarly corrupt governments marked perhaps the single most important exercise in American populist democracy in modern history. Abandoned by our own leaders all the way up to the president, belittled and insulted by the worldwide media, the American people, led by the conservative movement, stood up unyielding to put an end to the absurdity that would have brought about our own destruction.
Rumor has it that out of the deluge of phone calls made by Americans to lobby against the amnesty program, there may have even been one or two made by liberals. If so, then it marked an across the party lines unity of purpose rarely seen in America. One of the principal architects of the amnesty plan, though by no means the only one hailing from the Republican party, and thus one of the protagonists responsible for this unprecedented unity is John McCain.
While having McCain as a uniter may be a new experience for those on the left-side of the aisle, we on the right can attest to this great talent of his from way back. Prior to his spearheading the Mexican invasion, McCain co-wrote in the bill that eternally bears witness to his complete mistrust of the American people’s judgement – the McCain-Feingold bill. Most conservatives responded to that particular McCain rallying cry by immediately rallying against him. The utter disgraceful debacles that have ensued from this bill attest to the enduring common sense of the conservative rank and file who opposed it and who still do.
Who are McCain’s constituents?
.If only McCain had bothered to listen to his constituents. But you see, here’s the rub. Who exactly are McCain’s constituents? Whom exactly does he serve?
More than any other issue of the past seven years, Americans are united against illegal immigration so who exactly is McCain representing? Mexicans? Large companies that benefit form the de-facto slave labor of the illegals to the detriment of the rest of us? Well fine, let them vote for him.
Was the McCain-Feingold bill born out some great republican groundswell that demanded it? Nope.
Did campaign financing as it was prior to the bill represent some sort of egregious violation of constitutional rights? Nope.
Why then did McCain decide to make it his first cause célèbre? The only answer I can come up is way too cynical so I’ll leave it up to you to decide. More to the point, once the bill was publicized and the tremendous backlash from the right was on the front page of every publication in the country why didn’t McCain recant? Well for one, the front pages that carried the Republican backlash did so to ridicule it and to hail Feingold and McCain as great moderates and yes indeed “uniters”! One can only deduce that John McCain thought the mass media to be his constituency not conservative Americans. Well, fine, then let the damn media vote for him as he diligently prepares his place in the pantheon of other great moderates.
It was not to be the last time that McCain’s made highly questionable choices of constituents. How many conservatives, Republican or otherwise, agreed with Senator McCain’s stint as clerk to the ACLU as they relentlessly fought to undermine US policy and our ability to fight the war on terror by attempting to bring Gitmo detainees to US courts? It’s futile to ask why McCain would choose to oppose decades and decades of case law and legal tradition as he allied himself with an organization that was formed with the scope of destroying US society. It isn’t futile, however, to ask whom exactly was he representing in that action? Republicans? Conservatives? Hell no. Most of us in poll after poll disagreed with him! The Gitomo prisoners? Well, again let them vote for him.
Is a heart patient a cardiac surgeon?
One of the more perverse abuses of his position has been his alleged expertise on torture. McCain is no more qualified to set the country’s torture policy than a cardiac surgery patient is qualified to perform a heart transplant. His complete hypocrisy on this issue is exemplified by his own solution to the nuclear question. “What if torturing a suspect would prevent a nuclear bomb from detonating in a major US city?” The incredible intellectual dishonesty that McCain’s answer unveiled would have been enough to run him out of the senate in simpler times. To paraphrase, his convoluted solution went something like this: The torture itself would be illegal but the grateful American people would forgive the perpetrators. It’s hard to believe that such a statement could be conceived by a person who wants to lead the free world.
Its harder still to understand whom exactly was McCain representing in this action? The vast majority of Americans answered that indeed torture should be allowed in such a case. The overwhelming majority of Conservatives answered that even the possible saving of a single US life was reason enough to conduct the type of aggressive interrogation that is today mistakenly classified as torture. Again who is he representing? Captured terrorists in the Global War on Terror? Well, let the damn terrorists vote for him!
Senator McCain, the American people have time after time repudiated your ideas and have sent you back to your drawing board. Time after time you came back to present us with an even bigger catastrophe! Do you think that all of us who made the phone calls that shoved your Criminal Alien Amnesty program right back down your throat will vote for you? If so, your delusion is probably clinical.
As a mere senator, you spearheaded, along with Lindsey Graham (he of the Ted Kennedy kneecap sucking fame) what would have been a quick and certain destruction of America. What American in their right mind would give you a chance to do it again as the chief executive? As a uniter of conservatives and even across party lines you have been unmatched since Ronaldus Maximus (that’s a great one oh Great One). But unlike the beloved Reagan, the party and the country has been united against you – not with you.
Now, as I write this, I have no idea what a bunch of capricious independents (and I can think of fewer more degrading terms than that) are thinking as they get ready to vote in the primary, but this I do know, Mr. McCain, the world cannot afford you!