"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." Samuel Adams

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Hold my nose? No!

Rather than offer a comment to the posts below about “holding my nose” to vote for McCain, let me launch this as a new post. Not only will I not hold my nose, I will vote with my fingers crossed, my lucky rabbit’s foot in my pocket, and my nose – or at least my chin – held high.

John McCain is not the perfect candidate. Far from it. Indeed, he’s been a nuisance and often a fool throughout his career. Indeed, that career has done nothing to endear him to Republicans, let alone conservatives. One has often had the sense – arrived at fairly – that McCain has always considered the good favor of the New York Times to be more important than the good favor of The National Review. He has very much earned the scorn that conservatives have heaped on him.

In the primary campaign, it was perfectly understandable that conservatives voted for ABM – anybody but McCain. That’s all past us now. Because of the flawed rules of the nominating process – which allow independents and even democrats to have a voice in the selection of our Republican candidate – McCain divided and conquered a flawed field of candidates and emerged as the nominee.

Today, he is what we have standing between us and the Democratic People’s Republic of the Americas. For all his flaws, McCain demonstrably loves his country. For all his flaws, McCain has already shown that he will not betray this country – even when hanging from a meat hook, he will be true to America. He doesn’t blame America for the world’s ills; he doesn’t believe that half this country’s people – the most generous and magnanimous people in the history of the planet - are racists. He does not believe the Constitution is fundamentally flawed. He does not believe America needs to be remade from the ground up. He does not believe infants should be flushed away into the nation’s s sewage system. John McCain has plenty of flaws; others have detailed them elsewhere. I’m not interested in those flaws just now. Just now, I don’t care that he doesn’t measure up to my idea of the perfect candidate.

So, no, I will not hold my nose when I vote for John McCain. I’ll hold my breath.

2 comments:

Brian C. Caffrey said...

Bill, you know how I feel about McCain; but at this point, you've said it all when you say that he's the only thing standing between us and the monumentally awful communist Obama. I would prefer that we not have to launch a revolution; it might take more than the rest of my life to restore our way of life. (Obviously, we should do what we have to do.) For this reason, I went to the Hershey rally today, I wore the t-shirt, I wore the hat, I've made calls for the ticket, I cheered for the Great Maverick. At this point, I'm trying to save my country.

Bill said...

I hear you all the way.

I agree that the restoration will be a long time coming; it'll be a hard slog and the payoff may not come in our lifetime.

The challenge we face is that easy and cheap sentiment always prevails when you're dealing with an intellectually lazy (and, increasingly, morally bankrupt) populace. When Obama and his comrades promise utopia, who wants to hear some curmudgeon shouting alarms from the rooftop?