Make Mine McCain.
Moral Authority and Leadership
By Hunter Baker Posted in 2008 — Comments (29) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Some of our esteemed Redstate contributors have made formal endorsements this year. I've held off, not because I hate the field, but because I liked different things about different candidates.
Rudy performed a miracle in New York.
Huckabee has turned fewer dollars into more results than anyone in modern electoral history.
Romney is an obviously decent man, a top notch practicing capitalist, and loves America despite America's ambivalent attitude toward his church.
Fred could order the death penalty for Michael Moore and America would buy it.
But none of those candidates are going to close the deal with me (especially since Fred's out). I'm going with McCain.
Follow me under the fold . . .
Why McCain? Why am I supporting the guy who has been a maverick in the Senate and who is actively opposed by people I admire?
I'll tell you why. John McCain is the right president for an America still fighting the war on terror.
When Cindy Sheehan was in vogue, enthusiastic supporters in the press loved to say she had "absolute moral authority" as the mother of a soldier who died in the war.
You want absolute moral authority? John McCain has it if anyone does. You may get tired of hearing it, but it is impossible to render too much respect to a man who was badly injured when his combat aircraft crashed, bayoneted by angry villagers, permanently damaged by neglect of his broken bones by his captors, tortured, and who refused to accept an offer to go home as the son of an admiral ahead of his fellow soldiers.
John McCain is a man who gave everything he could short of his life for his country in an unpopular war. You can't look at that man's bent body and not see it. You also can't see that same body and not see the fiery spirit animating the man.
I want that man asking Americans to stay the course. John McCain knows something about perseverance.
Plus, I think he's better than the alternatives.
Fred is out.
Giuliani is simply unacceptable to pro-lifers. I'm one of those. When the GOP stops being a pro-life party, it can stop counting on my vote.
Huckabee is an awesome politician, but he still needs seasoning. This is not the blissful period following the Cold War that welcomed another awesome politician from Arkansas into the Oval Office. This is war. He's not ready, yet.
Mitt Romney is a one term governor who won his office in a good Republican year. He is a strong technocrat when we need a stalwart leader. It may not be fair to point this out, but our last one term governor with a reputation as a technocrat to serve as president was Jimmy Carter.
John McCain is pro-life enough, pro-small government enough, and a foe of pork. Add in his acceptability on those issues with his obvious quality as a leader for a nation waging war on terror, and you've got the best candidate in the field.
(And by the way, it doesn't hurt that the press just spent the last seven years making McCain out to be Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)
I'm voting McCain.
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Make Mine McCain. 29 Comments (0 topical, 29 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
you feel you can support. Personally, I dislike McCain due for selling us out with the gang of 14. I think he's dishonest about his support for the Bush tax cuts. He scares me to death when he talks about global warming and I think as president he could enact legislation that will destroy our economy. I think he is unknowledgeable about the economy.
There's a reason the NY Times has endorsed him. There's a reason the MSM loves him. They're the same reasons that I dislike him.
**"The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." - John McCain"**
I thought the Gang of 14 forestalled the GOP majority from using the "Constitutional Option" and allowed the Senate to maintain the ability to filibuster nominees. Since the GOP has LOST the Senate doesn't this now work to our advantage??? Didn't McCain have the foresight to see that changing the rules one day would work against us?
My biggest concern is that the infamous New York Times just endorsed McCain. I lean to Giuliani still, but I could live with McCain if he represented the only chance of keeping the White House.
"I can say - not as a patriotic bromide...that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and...the only moral country in the history of the world. - Ayn Rand
We have a whole lot of very short-sighted folks here who, in their righteous indignation over a Senator's effective compromise (yes, effective -- to the tune of Roberts and Alito being confirmed to the Supreme Court without a filibuster), are allowing their McDS to render them so out of touch with reality that they can't even see the obvious fact that, now that the GOP is the minority party (and especially with the possibility of a D pres and D senate), having that filibuster option on the table may be the only hope of avoiding up to three far-left SCOTUS appointees in the next few years.
But hey, sometimes it just feels good to be mad, I suppose.
If you believe that the Republicans would filibuster nominees they consider liberal and that Democrats won't simply trigger the Byrd option. I don't believe for former is the case, and I'm pretty certain the latter isn't the case.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
McCain votes for Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer by saying that McCain simply was deferring to President Clinton on judicial nominees. This is also the most obvious explanation as to why McCain never filibustered a single Clinton judicial nominee during that 8 year time period.
But when a Republican is in the White House and Democrats filibuster Bush's judicial nominees, Republicans threaten to use the Byrd option (used by Byrd 4 time while Senate Majority Leader).
McCain's reaction is to annouce that he will vote with the Democrats because, he said, he might want to filibuster a liberal nominee by a Democrat president. It's a very clever shell game directed at Republicans who aren't familiar with McCain's entire record.
The rules keep changing to facilitate the movement of the federal courts to the Left. When a Democrat is president the McCain rules are defer to the president and don't filibuster. When a Republican is president the McCain rules are that filibustering judicial nominees is perfectly acceptable.
you actually expect any filibustering from the republicans.
Hatch recommended the head of the ACLU legal team and she got 98 votes form those fine folks you think will ever filibuster a dem judge.
Take a click over to confirm them and see how many appellate court judges we still need.
I would say yes the gang of 14 was a bad thing.
Great! Hunter Baker & NY Times choose the same person.
I'll now ignore Hunter Baker... Who are you anyways?
...a writer for the American Spectator, a Social Conservative, an attorney and an academic with a Ph.D in Religion, and a Contributor to this site.
And you'll be respectful to him from here on out.
Se7en,
I was once in a classroom full of students who decided what was true by who said it. If Jesse Helms said it, then it couldn't be true. I think there's something wrong with that reasoning, don't you?
But I would recommend this if I could. Nice post.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
We are all salivating at the fight to keep the Clintons out of the White House. But how will the Clintons run against Romney and McCain. What will the Clinton machine say about our guys?
Last night, Romney represented business, and whether we like it or not, he looked and sounded like the outsider that President Bush was eight years ago. He looked like another Halliburton, Harvard MBA. I just heard Chris' guy ask Romney's guy what's the difference between your guy and Bush?
Clearly, the Clintons first line of attack will be to wave Mitt off with “Do we want four more years of GWB type leadership?” There is nothing that distinguishes Bush from Romney.
Therefore at the first opportunity, Clinton is going to unleash one of her Bush tirades that Romney is his clone. Another republican governor touting business credentials.
Look at what the current Repub Governor has done for our economy. By the time, Mitt gets done with selling Bush downriver to extricate himself from the Clinton web of Bush tirades, Bill will be picking china patterns in the White House.
Out will go the disunity the Clintons have created and in will come Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Whether you Romneybots, Rush, Sean and Mark, like it or not, with Bush’s poll numbers, we have to consider whether we really want to run GW’s clone as the nominee right now?
Even George Bush had the good sense to refuse to endorse his good democrat friend Lieberman because he recognized that to Independents and Conservative Democrats, Bush is toxic.
Do we really want to run another Bush, who is not Jeb Bush in this election cycle? No conservative dems, indies, or even mainstream repubs are going to go for another Harvard MBA.
McCain, has no such connection to Bush. The Surge that worked was called the MCCAIN SURGE. McCain is strictly I was for the war while you threw our kids under the bus. We have to cut taxes and STOP SPENDING.
McCain won’t face the distraction of stupid commercials like “well look at what the last Republican governor did with our Iraq Strategy, he blundered it.” With McCain, those questions don’t even come up. The issue if McCain runs is ONLY HRC supported Iraq until it became politically expedient to bail and throw our troops under the bus.
Second, Romney’s “Change” message sounds like the fundamentals of our economy are NOT okay, even though unemployment is at 5% and the market went up 300 points today.
Sean and Rush have been sounding off against these the sky is falling ninnies. The only guy to remind everyone that the fundamentals of the economy were sound last night, that we have to cut spending was McCain.
Stop drinking the Coolaid and stop blathering. There was no constitional option. The fight was about Senate rules. McCain circumvented a very real need to bring the Democrats to heel.
If the Democrats were in the Republicans position they would have proceeded to do what the Republicns should have done.
You look at what was achieved by the gang of 14 withiout looking at those judges left in the dirt. The suggestion that two Supreme Court judges resulted from the gang is ludicrous because without the gang they would have been confirmed.
because conservatives will stay home. He isn't a conservative. A lot of conservatives won't vote for a candidate they know (in advance) will sell the country down the river on the global warming hoax and sic an extreme regulatory machine and energy restrictions on the country, will not push hard for tax rate reductions because they benefit the "wealthy", has no regard for free political speech, won't appoint judges/justices who do (i.e., judicial conservatives!), wants the ACLU looking over the shoulder of Al Qaeda interrogators and wants to lay out the welcome mat to illegals.
Other than that, however....
________________________________________________________
Halls of Justice Painted Green, Money Talking.
Power Wolves Beset Your Door, Hear Them Stalking.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
being undercut and stabbed on the back on issue after issue and bing told you are stupid and a bigot, and your man making common cause with the very worse of left wingers, and disdainfully telling you that he knows better than you, and then taking away your rights of political speech?
You are like a battered spouse.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
McCain's friend of the court brief against Wisconsin Right to Life is one example of why I will not support McCain for president in the primaries or in the general.
We are all being told that McCain will appoint people like Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts to the US Supreme Court. But as many have pointed out, those 4 Justices found the only legislative accomplishment McCain has had in over 20 years in the Senate constitutionally problematic. The case they heard was one in which McCain filed a friend of the court brief opposing Wisconsin Right to Life.
Given that McCain vocally supported, in principle, the right of Democrats to filibuster conservative judicial nominees (while most Republicans were trying to remove this capability from the Democrat minority), given that McCain has said that he would appoint Warren Rudman as Attorney General as President (and Warren Rudman was the pro-abortion New Hamshire US Senator who admitted that it was he who promoted David Souter to be a US Supreme Court Justice and that he was thrilled that Souter turned out to be pro-abortion and pro Roe versus Wade), maybe this stuff about appointing conservatives to the high court is just an empty promise of a politician who will revert back to being a New York Times Republican as soon as he gets past the primaries.
McCain agrees with the Left on the treatment of captured terrorists and on bi-lingual education and on racial quotas and affirmative action and on lavish welfare benefits for illegal aliens who have travelled the "path to citizenship."
McCain has agreed with the Left on the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts (only to support extending them while still thinking that he and Ted Kennedy were correct to oppose them). McCain agrees with the Left when he says that drug companies are the bad guys.
that the drug companies are the bad guys. I am in no way in favor of a government mandated health care system, but don't tell me the drug companies aren't getting rich off the backs of regular folks. They charge Americans much more than other countries, to pay for so-called "research & development" costs. Bull. We pay for the bonuses to execs.
No different than the health care insurers that are bogusly increasing your rates 20 - 30% a year. As a former auditor (who audited one of these companies) & current CFO, I have seen the uncalled for rate increases first hand. They move money from their for-profits to their non-profit arms to avoid taxes, bonus out large $$ to execs and sit on billions in unneeded reserves. Last year alone, our insurer built in a 30% increase based on the "expected cost increases" for them. They made a profit on our last contract of over 40%. Unfortunately, with the demographics of our company, they are the only insurer that we can use & they know it. These increases were included even though we went to a high deductible plan. It's enough to make you sick.
Having audited hospitals & outpatient clinics, I have seen that these insurers pay about 40% of the actual bill you get. The hospitals accept this as full payment. If you go in without insurance, they charge you the same rate and expect you to pay it in full. There's a disconnect there.
As I said, I don't want universal health care, but something needs done. I would love to see the Republicans do something groundbreaking here to help business owners and the people that work for them. We carry health insurance for all of our staff & have pledged to continue it, but at some point we aren't going to be able to afford it.
Are you okay with George W.? He allowed Ted Kennedy to co-opt his educational reform, passed one of the largest entitlement packages in history, and badly mishandled the war in Iraq. I suspect we might have done better with McCain in 2000.
.. and badly mishandled the war in Iraq ..
I'll give you the first two (they're objections of mine as well), but that line, well, it looks, smells, and feels like a liberal talking point. Given the total clusterf*** that Iraq was from the very beginning (the entire political structure of the country had been destroyed for the purposes of keeping Saddam Hussein in power), I think W has done a fairly decent job in Iraq.
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Finrod's First Law of Bandwidth:
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes the bandwidth of ten thousand.
National Security is the only part of the President's job where he has nearly unchecked authority and undiluted responsibility.
The President doesn't pass laws; Congress does. He can encurage them to pass a bill, and he can sign the bill when it comes to him (or veto it), but absent that there is nothing he can do.
He doesn't appoint Judges, he NOMINATES them. The Senate confirms them.
He doesn't control or manage the economy ... as if such a thing could be done. AFAIK he doesn't even control the Fed. All the MBA business skills in the world are semi-useless in the Presidency.
He doesn't even get to decide how the government spends money. Congress appropriates funds. He merely gets a veto.
But the President does command the Armed Forces and the other agencies of national security (FBI, CIA, NSA, HLS, DOE). In that capacity, every day he makes hard decisions and gives orders with zero input from Congress or the courts. That is clearly his most crucial responsibility.
McCain is by far the most qualified candidate to be Commander in Chief. The difference between him and Giuliani or Romney on that count is staggering. McCain has spent his entire adult life working on national security. Giuliani and Romney are good men, but neither of them has a single day in uniform, and neither of them has any experience or expertise in national security.
"If all men were just, there would be no need of valor."
- Agesilaus
If he wants to focus on national security so much, let him do it that way, and spare the country his many liberal policies.
I'd rather avoid ongoing wars and occupations, but if war is necessary, and if he is such a great strategist, then POTUS is the wrong job for him anyway.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
Even as CIC, the President cannot ignore the Constitution, laws passed by Congress or Rulings made by the Supreme Court. The President has some leeway and is granted much authority on issues of national security, but that is granted him by the Constitution and by Congress.
and now I hate him back.
That crap with Lindsey Grahamnesty and McCain calling us bigots for wanted the tide of illegals stopped made me sick to my stomach.
How anybody could vote for such a man is beyond me. He will sell you out, you can be assured of it.
Most of his weaknesses in the primary become strengths in the general, assuming we don't cut off our noses to spite our faces and stay home in November. McCain will easily welcome back the Reagan Democrats, especially if Hillary is the nominee.
Romney, despite his considerable talents, is already considered a Republican Bill Clinton in terms of slipperiness and triangulation by the press and the left. Oh, and by quite a few of us on the right, too.