Looking at John McCain, from the Left
TruGOP
September 7, 2006

Howard Kurtz, a Washington Post Staff Writer had this to say about Jonathan Chait in the Washington Post on Sunday, October 19, 2003; Page D01:

The words tumble out, the hands gesture urgently, as Jonathan Chait explains why he hates George W. Bush.
"It's Bush's radical policies," says the 31-year-old New Republic writer, "and his unfair tax cuts, and his cowboy phoniness, and his favors for corporate cronies, and his heist in Florida, and his dishonesty about his silver-spoon upbringing, and, oh yes, the way he walks and talks."
For some of his friends, Chait says at a corner table in a downtown Starbucks, "just seeing his face or hearing his voice causes a physical reaction -- they have to get away from the TV. My sister-in-law describes Bush's existence as an oppressive force, a constant weight on her shoulder, just knowing that George Bush is president."

In a lighter vein, Kurtz goes on to say:

"Ramesh Ponnuru, a soft-spoken conservative at National Review, pays Chait a backhanded compliment, writing that 'not everyone would be brave enough to recount their harrowing descent into madness so vividly.'"

So Jonathan Chait, a journalist, qualifies as a liberal, true blue, through-and-through. I am telling you that in order to tell you this: The Lefties don't understand John McCain or trust him any more than we, in his republican "base" do. They look at his left leaning actions and hope they see who he is but fear he might really be what his right-leaning actions indicate. The same might be said of us if you simply exchange the words "hope" and "fear". If you ever saw the musical "Best Little Whore House in Texas", you could almost have understood John McCain the instant the Governor finished his number "The Sidestep".

Chait goes on to say:

"In George Orwell's 1984, the totalitarian regime had, only a few years before, been allied with rival power Eurasia. But, as the narrator explains, "since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one," the regime could insist it had always been at war with Eurasia, and everybody believed it.

Fortunately, we live in a free country, where one can access the written record through databases of old newspaper and magazine articles. Apparently I'm the only journalist who bothers to use them, so let me remind everybody of a few pertinent facts."

In the articles linked below Chait assembles a near complete list of the things McCain has done that make his nomination by Republicans for President far from a sure bet:

So, keeping in mind that Chait's a liberal, read what he thinks that they think-hope-pray, about a possible McCain Presidential Campaign.

Why John McCain is the Democrats' best hope.

Fake Right

Strategic Planning

Remember what Chait said in "Fake Right":

During this time, McCain's advisors openly discussed the possibility of a third-party presidential run. He even flirted with a straight party switch. McCain had Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle stay at his home for the weekend. He met privately with several Democrats to consider switching parties, reported The Washington Post. After the Democratic Leadership Council's Will Marshall met to court him, McCain remarked, "I was struck by how much we were in common." Two of his top advisors, John Weaver and Marshall Wittmann, left the GOP and began working for Democrats.

If Johnny Carson were still playing "Karnak" he would hold the envelope to his forhead and say: "McCain/Lieberman". Inside it would read: "Dream ticket of the 2008 Moderate wing of the Democrat Party".

If, in the real world, liberal ideas really resulted in net positive outcomes, John McCain might be onto something. But the results have been coming in since before the Great Depression. Anybody who is not invincibly ignorant, blind or stupid can dig into history and see that the ideas of the Left invariably lead to poverty, unhappiness, suffering and early death. Communist Russia, Cuba and North Korea, along with Socialist Europe and New Orleans (which has been run by democrats forever), would all be synomous with "paradise" if the ideas of the Left were actually any good.

While the Left might put up with the idea of a President McCain occasionally throwing a bone to conservatives there is no way conservatives should even consider the possibliity of a President McCain who has thrown as many bones leftward as Senator McCain has already.