Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, March 06, 2008 2:33:09 PM
I know I said I was going to stop writing about McCain for a while, but I really feel the need to go at it one last time.
Again and again, I see Republicans saying they want a Democrat to win because McCain will mean "the death of conservatism" and the Democrats are "too weak" or "too stupid" to do any harm.
I beg to differ on both counts.
First, on McCain. Yes, he is far form an ideal candidate, and he is far from a right-wing Republican, but he is still more conservative than the alternatives. And,
as I have said before, at least with McCain the right will have some voice in government, as opposed to a Hillary or Obama administration. Also,
as I pointed out earlier, McCain will find himself moving right, if only to shore up his prospect in November. He may still be too left for some, but as long as conservative votes are in play (that is, as long as we don't promise to sit it out) then he will end up wooing conservatives and moving himself to the right.
Now, to address the big mistake: The concept that Hillary and Obama can't do much harm.
Who is less competent that James Earl Carter Jr.? If you want to define incompetence, you just point to this man. He seems a sure bet for a weak politician who could do no harm. Yet, he did more harm than we care to admit.
Do you ever worry about a nuclear Iran? Well, blame President Carter. When the revolution took place, Carter abandoned our ally the Shah, allowed the revolution to continue, gave the revolutionaries a feeling of power by letting them hold hostages, and then made them even more confident by botching a rescue. All of this brought about by a man we would think too incompetent to do harm.
Do you hate $100/barrel gasoline? Well, yes,
Nixon is largely to blame, due to price controls, but Carter did everything he could to make it worse. When OPEC began to bully the US, rather than start domestic exploration, liberalizing environmental laws to increase production, or some other muscular strategy designed to worry and weaken OPEC, Carter talked about setting the thermostat lower, putting on a sweater, and started tossing around the word "malaise".
And that's not all. The Savings and Loan collapse? The recession in the early 1980's? Hyperinflation throughout the late 1970's? The loss of the Panama Canal? Concessions to the USSR? Setting the stage for Soviet aggression throughout the 1980's? Bowing to the Sandinistas* and other communist movements in the Americas?
Well, all of those things came from an incompetent, weak president. We are still, over twenty years later, suffering from one four year term of an incompetent president.
So, please, go ahead and sit this out if you don't mind seeing Obama of Hillary hand Afghanistan to Iran, hand Iraq to al Qaida, allow Israel to be dismembered by Hammas, allow Syria to dominate Lebanon again, hand Taiwan to China, raise top marginal taxes back above 50%, enact environmental legislation that will cripple us for another two decades, reintroduce us to REAL inflation and unemployment, and install supreme court justices who will ruin the nation for another 30 years or more.
Yes, McCain may do some harm, but I just don't see him doing anything nearly as harmful as what Obama or Hillary will do.
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* For those following my ongoing war with my browser spell-checker, I will add another strange oversight. While recognizing an endless list of political groups, for some reason "Sandinistas" causes my browser to complain, though "Sandinista" does not. So, it will accept the word "facer", but not "Sandinista" when made plural? It is actually worse than useless. (It also engages in strange multicultural quirks, such as not accepting cliche without the accent, but that does not explain the "Sandinistas" problem, as, in Spanish, the plural of "Sandinista" is "Sandinistas". So it is now wrong in two languages.)