If this attitude had been on display the past seven years against Bush:
Ace has some lengthy and thoughtful comments on why McCain will indeed continue to screw conservatives from here on out. Read it all, and tell me it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Yeah, I’ll still vote for the little [expletive deleted]er in the general election. But you know what? I’m going to keep bashing him anyway. And I’m going to make especially sure I bash him, by name, within 60 days of the election — in honor of his past assaults on free speech.
I love the Republican party — but I love irony more.
The damage Bush has done to conservatism (*see the note below) FAR outweighs whatever transgressions the right think McCain has committed (really, Bush’s lone successes for conservatives have been Alito and Roberts, deals McCain helped to broker), yet there was little to no substantive criticism of Bush. What if conservatives had unleashed the venom they now fling at McCain on this administration when they were:
1.) Doing a crappy job prosecuting the war in Iraq
2.) Failing to direct adequate resources to Afghanistan
3.) Passing the Prescription drug Plan
4.) Passing bloated and unbalanced budgets
5.) Writing special legislation for Terri Schiavo.
And on and on and on. What if, rather than deriding anyone who pointed this stuff out as having BDS, they punished Bush and company for their transgressions? Had they done so, had they actually stopped drinking the kool-aid and paused the “Democrats are worse” chorus, we might not have this situation:
Substantial attention has been paid to the historic unpopularity of the Bush presidency, but relatively little attention has been paid to the accompanying collapse of the Republican Party’s credibility. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll reveals that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle every issue of any significance, including — by a now fairly wide margin– “the U.S. campaign against terrorism”
The basis of McCain’s support this election cycle was correctly pointed out by the Bradrocket yesterday, as he laughed at the “conservatives” who, after spending months flinging poo at John McCain, now expect him to come lick their boots AFTER he has won the nomination despite their best efforts:
In other words, he’s succeeded largely because he’s convinced a sizable number of people in this country that he has nothing to do with all-out lunatics like you guys. If he’s come this far without your help, then there is no upside to him coming out and giving the finger to subprime borrowers who have just lost their homes, as you’d prefer him to do. Sorry, guys, but your ideology has become political poison in this country, even in the damn Republican primaries. If you want people to vote for you in the future, maybe you should stop wearing your sociopathy so overtly on your sleeves.
Pretty much.
*Note- Conservative and conservatism are now meaningless terms, as conservative now means Crazy yahoo who loves him some Bush and goes along unflinchingly with whatever dumb ideas the NRO, Hewitt, and Malkin now claim are “conservative”.