Reason #3 why McCain could win in November

McCain most likely opponent in the general election, Barack Obama, is actually a hard core leftist. Recently, President Bush publically criticised Obama's intention to meet with dictators such as Castro:

“What's lost ... by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs?” he said. “What's lost is, it'll send the wrong message. It'll send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. It'll give great status to those ... who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.

On the other hand, Barack Obama sees nothing wrong with this:

Obama responded in a statement: “The American people aren’t looking for more of a do-nothing Cuba policy that has failed to secure the release of dissidents, failed to bring democracy to the island, and failed to advance freedom for fifty years, because they know we need to pursue new opportunities to achieve liberty for the Cuban people. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will offer the clearest contrast to John McCain’s call for four more years of George Bush’s policies, because I want to fundamentally change our foreign policy to secure the American people and restore our standing in the world."

Let's look at the big picture. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Clinton and (presumably) potential president McCain are all more or less agreed in policy with the current President Bush in regard to Cuba. Potential president Obama, on the other hand, more or less has only President Carter on his side. Yes, you read that right: Obama is proudly bearing the slogan "My foreign policy will be just like Carter's" and expecting to win the presidency with it. That alone is proof positive that Obama isn't qualified for the job.

Yet another banal attack on science.

"The Telegraph" recently published an article attacking the practice of scientific peer review and suggesting free scientific publishing on the internet as a remedy (hat tip: Vox Day). No, seriously, it did:

As we enter the Wiki-world, peer review will lighten. Scientific publishing is being transformed by the web: people once paid for hard copies of journals, but now free periodicals such as Public Library of Science Biology proliferate online.

They are still peer-reviewed, but soon reputable scientists will start to publish their own electronic papers. The convenience will be irresistible.

Some form of peer review will need to survive, to deter fraudsters, but it will probably resemble the one practised by the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, in which, essentially, distinguished friends simply vouch for each other.

And a good thing, too. Peer review was always an illusion, providing a deceptive imprimatur of objective truth.

Less formal arrangements will remind us that new science is always provisional - and that validation comes only after publication, when others try to reproduce the work.

The argument the article makes is practically self-refuting. Simply put, we are expected to believe that Herr Einstein is simply too biased to prevent his personal jealosies from interfering from his scientific judgement but that the combined judgement of Herr Einstein with that of Fraulein Spears provides flawlessly unbiased, totally neutral scientific judgement. Frankly, the answer is no.

If the article's lazy assumption that an eminent scientist is actually the one person you cannot trust to seriously vet your scientific results makes you suspect a pro-Christian agenda here, you might be on to something. The obsession with "objective truth" is second only to the invocation of the biblical Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1 as a signifier of the Christian anti-scientific modus operandi.

Yet more BCE/CE lunacy.

Did you ever buy a book that looks like a really great read, but that contains a mind-bogglingly stupid blunder in the first few pages that keeps you from reading further? I found a book like that in "God's Crucible" by David Levering Lewis.

In the notes on usage page xix, Lewis wrote:

Time unfolds in this book within two eras: Before the Common Era (BCE) and in the Common Era (CE) in which we still live. The presumptuous "Before Christ" (BC) and "anno Domini" (AD) cede to an ecumenism cognizant of historical interdependence and parity.

So the author endorses the terminology "Before the Common Era" and BCE as good, ecumenical, and enlightened, and he explains that the terminology "Before Christ" and BC is just plain rude. I don't like it, but I can accept it. Then on pages 4 and 5, Lewis wrote:

The Roman and the Iranian upper classes were too busy fighting among themselves and consolidating territorial conquests to take much notice of each other until a century and a half before the birth of the Christian messiah.

I'm going to go into work tomorrow with the red slapmark of my own palm hitting my forehead. Thank you, David Levering Lewis.

The Chameleon strikes in the dark.

It looks like Senator John McCain's reputation as a "Burkean Conservative" just got blown out of the water after less than two weeks since Super Tuesday. Andrew Sullivan explains (author's hyperlinks):

So McCain reveals himself as a positioner even on the subject [torture] on which he has gained a reputation for unimpeachable integrity. It's worth reading Jon Chait's illuminating new piece in this context. I repeat that I am heartbroken. McCain has indeed been a leader in preventing the military from torturing terror suspects, and in banning waterboarding. But by leaving this lacuna in the law, he gives this president the space he wants. As president himself, of course, McCain would surely instruct the CIA to uphold the American way of interrogation, and not to adopt techniques once used by the Gestapo and prosecuted by the US as war crimes. But we now know that there will be one difference between Obama and McCain in November. One will never tolerate torture; the other just did.

Here's more from Sullivan on the same topic:

Maybe McCain is waiting to take on the forces of Rove and the electoral advantages of appealing to crude, fascistic templates of "torture-them-or-we-all-die" variety. But McCain should know that when dealing with unscrupulous thugs, appeasement is not the best policy. He's the nominee. He needs to remind people that conservatism can be - must be - a decent political philosophy, that upholds, rather than trashes, the deepest moral traditions of the United States.

You see, true Burkean conservatism holds that wise, conservative leaders should govern by making deals with their enemies in order to destroy their allies. That's why John McCain's previous position on torture -- refusing to appease his political party, yet defending his policy of appeasing terrorists -- was so popular. It demonstrated that he understood the key dynamic of the torture debate in the United States: the need to be nice to Islamic terrorists in order to avoid alienating them as future allies.

On the other hand, it's not much of a surprise that McCain is switching his position to defending his fellow countryman now that Obama is emerging as a clear frontrunner in the Democratic primary contest. Obama's stated foreign policy goal of negotiating with Iran while unilaterally invading Pakistan makes him even more of a Burkean conservative than McCain. McCain would have been blind not to have seen that there was simply not enough room on the Burkean Right for both himself and Obama. McCain's shift is therefore nothing more than a classic political triangulation between Obama and Bush.

The Obama campaign declares checkmate.

Or words to that effect:

As we wrote last night, Obama has begun to make his own inevitablity case, and David Plouffe made it explicit on a conference call this morning, telling reporters that it's now "next to impossible" for Clinton to surpass what he says is a 136-person lead among pledged delegates.

On the one hand, this might be absolutely true. On the other hand, the first thing Obama should have learned in "running for office 101" is "Don't pull a Gingrich, dude."

Reason #2 why McCain could win in November

Because Camille Paglia thinks he's a loser:

John McCain's courage under torture during the Vietnam War deserves everyone's gratitude and respect. But as a national candidate, the stumpy, uptight McCain is a lemon. Oy, that weaselly voice and those dated locutions and stilted intonations. Who needs a weird old coot with a short fuse in the White House? This isn't a smart game plan for the war on terror.

She also thinks that "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" is a truely great, compelling film (embedded hyperlink removed):

A quite different film that I've recently enjoyed re-seeing and studying is "Revenge of the Sith" (2005) from George Lucas' "Star Wars" saga. The climactic light-saber duel between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi on the volcano planet of Mustafar (with footage of actual explosions and lava flows at Mount Etna in Sicily) is nearly mystically sublime in the High Romantic sense. The convulsive, manly passion between the two tortured Jedi is hyper-sustained by John Williams' powerful music. Then there's Anakin's shocking mutilation and Wagnerian immolation, leading to the grisly Frankenstein surgery that turns him into Darth Vader and that is cross-cut with a parallel hospital sequence, as Anakin's wife, Padme, dies while giving birth to the twins Luke and Leia.

McCain is a tired, old coot, and Lucas is the Dostoyevsky of his generation. Ok, sure, whatever you say.

Reason #1 why McCain could win in November

Whether you love Senator John McCain or hate his guts, you do have to admit that he was pretty quick to checkmate the conservative movement once primary season got started. If you can maneuver El Rushbo into a situation préoccupant, you just might have what it takes to take down Obama or Hillary.

Conspiracy Theories a Go Go

Now that it's relatively quiet on the Western front of World War Hillary, it's time to let a few conspiracy theories and random zaniness grab some attention. Thus, totally irresponsible and unwarranted analysis will accumulate here for the next few hours.

• Mark Hemingway at National Review Online warns that Hillary Clinton hasn't lost the nomination yet:

  Still, Hillary is not a natural like Obama. By this point in the campaign cycle she’s polished enough, though it’s hard not to shake the feeling she’s auditioning for something. Her meticulous hand motions are obviously coached, as is the way her voice drops to convey her astonishment at some fact or story she’s told dozens of times.
  
  Nothing she does or says on the stump is particularly inspirational, but her skills in retail politics exude a confidence that make it seem that if someone as divisive as Hillary Clinton can master the art of making people like her, she can tackle any problem.
  
  We don’t know yet if that will take her all the way to the White House. But for now, it’s good enough to get soccer moms to jump out of their seats and dance, and that’s all she needs to do to keep Obama at bay.

  On general principles, I think it's safe to say that until the Electoral College actually announces the election of a new president who isn't Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton is still "in it to win it". Even if Barack Obama wins the Democratic party nomination, he doesn't really think that the Clinton's are going to stop messing with him, does he? Call it Clintonfreude: the vicarious pleasure that one receives when Bill Clinton f**ks with someone and it makes the national news. You can practically read the headlines already: "Bill Clinton Upstages Obama at Dem Convention", "Bill Clinton Calls For Wife to Replace Obama on Ballot", "Bill Clinton Lobbies Electoral College on Wife's Behalf".



• The best Clintonfreude conspiracy theory that I've seen so far is the idea that Bill Clinton is actually passively-aggressively undermining his wife's campaign:

  So here’s a crazy theory that occurred to me the other day, and that gets more plausible the more I think about it: [Bill] Clinton’s comments [comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson] were calculated, but they may have been more sinister than even the activist I met knows. Clinton–perhaps subconsciously–was sabotaging his wife’s campaign.
  
  Crazy? Maybe. But bear with me, here. Clinton had to have known that marginalizing Obama wouldn’t work. He knows Obama is a talented politician, that he isn’t a demagogue like Jackson, and that he has already demonstrated that he can attract white voters in large swaths–Obama certainly didn’t win Iowa by dominating the black vote, did he?
  
  So why would Clinton do it? Well, maybe he doesn’t want his wife to be president.

  Could this possibly be true? Would a respected two-term former president really sabotage the election of the most talented female politician of her generation -- possibly doing irrevocable damage to his party in the process -- for nothing more honorable than swinging the balance of power over the family cookie jar in his direction?
  
  I'm afraid to say that my gut answer just has to be no. This theory is just too gratifyingly Clintonfreude to be plausible. Also keep in mind that if she wins the election, Hillary Clinton is going to need Bill's frat-boy hijinks to neutralize John McCain's "Maverick" fighter-jockery. Letting Bill off the leash might therefore serve as a useful reminder to her enemies between now and November.



• Of course, even Obamamania seems relatively sane when compared to religious mania such as the present-day exorcism craze:

  POCZERNIN, Poland -- This wind-swept village is bracing for an invasion of demons, thanks to a priest who believes he can defeat Satan.
  
  The Rev. Andrzej Trojanowski, a soft-spoken Pole, plans to build a "spiritual oasis" that will serve as Europe's only center dedicated to performing exorcisms. With the blessing of the local Catholic archbishop and theological support from the Vatican, the center will aid a growing number of Poles possessed by evil forces or the devil himself, he said.

  Yes, otherwise intelligent, rational people want to spend a large sum of money to protect Europe from an invasion of invisible minds in search of brains. One would also think that "dual-use" institutions that could police both humans and the supernatural would make more sense. A zombie-control center that could double as an anti-riot police headquarters during political protests might come in handy. An anti-vampire "hit squad" could have any number of alternative employments. But training a cadre of priests to sit around with holy water while waiting for Grandma's powerball lotto winnings to attract Satan just doesn't seem cost effective to me.



• The Spanish inquisition: it didn't want to destroy Judaism, it just wanted to make Judaism "better":

  If the Spanish Inquisition was, as historian Henry Charles Lea once described it, theocratic absolutism at its worst, one can only conclude that this is an astonishingly positive testimony on behalf of theocratic absolutism. It is testimony to the strange vagaries of history that it should be the Spanish Inquisition that remains notorious today, even though the 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy murdered in the Spanish Republican Red Terror of 1936 is more than twice the number of the victims of 345 years of inquisition.

  The author's point seems to be that judicial murder is much more civilized than open partisan warfare. What a stirring selling point for theocracy!

The real reason why McCain is winning the Republican presidential nomination.

In hindsight, the reason is actually perfectly clear. John McCain is winning the Republican nomination because his rivals for the presidency wanted him to win. Deep down in the inner workings of the Republican party, McCain was annointed in advance, and the rest of the party insiders saw "the writing on the wall" and responded accordingly. Of course, nobody in the Republican party could be bothered to tell the main conservative media figures about this, which is why Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and others have all been acting like idiots for the last month or so. If you suspect that the primary season was something along the lines of a "hit" on the conservative media, you might be on to something.

In his analysis of the Republican nominating contest, Charles Krauthammer puts two and two together and comes up with 3.5; he points the finger at Bush for the McCain victory, but for the wrong reason. Krauthammer notes that:

Both [McCain and Giuliani] aroused deep suspicions among conservatives. Giuliani’s major apostasy is being pro-choice on abortion. McCain’s apostasies are too numerous to count. He’s held the line on abortion, but on just about everything else he could find — tax cuts, immigration, campaign-finance reform, Guantanamo — he not only opposed the conservative consensus but insisted on doing so with ostentatious self-righteousness.

The story of this campaign is how many Republicans didn’t care, and felt that national security trumps social heresy. The problem for Giuliani and McCain, however, was that they were splitting that constituency. Then came Giuliani’s humiliation in Florida. After he withdrew from the race, he threw his support to McCain — and took his followers with him.

Also consider his analysis of the behavior of the other candidates:

The other half of the story behind McCain’s victory is this: There would have been a far smaller Republican constituency for the apostate sheriff had there been a compelling conservative to challenge him. But there never was.

The first messianic sighting was Fred Thompson, who soared in the early polls, then faded because he was too diffident and/or normal to embrace with any enthusiasm the indignities of the modern campaign.

Then, for that brief and shining Iowa moment, there was Huckabee — until conservatives actually looked at his record (on taxes, for example) as governor of Arkansas, and listened to the music of his often unconservative populism.

That left Romney, the final stop in the search for the compelling conservative. I found him to be a fine candidate who would have made a fine president. But until very recently, he was shunned by most conservatives for ideological inauthenticity. Then, as the post-Florida McCain panic grew, conservatives tried to embrace Romney, but the gesture was both too late and as improvised and convenient-looking as Romney’s own many conversions. (So late and so improvised that it could not succeed. On Thursday, Romney withdrew from the race.)

Krauthammer finished the article by blaming Bush for paving the way for McCain in 2008. I think that's undoubtedly right in the ultimate sense, but I think it's also true that Bush pulling a lot more for McCain that Krauthammer thinks. Consider the correlation of forces at work here:

• There are plenty of real conservative politicians out there, but none of them can be bothered to run. Other than McCain, the only Republicans who jump into the race are the guys building their name recognition (Hunter, Huckabee), the third-party fringer (Paul), the half-conservatives (Huckabee, Romney, Giuliani), and the retiree (Thompson). Conservative pundits obviously didn't get the memo that McCain was pre-selected to win, so they're left scratching their heads wondering why they're stuck with a slate full of losers.



• Giuliani spends 2007 courting conservatives as the Republican front-runner, but then decides on a dramatically unconventional campaign strategy for the primaries that self-detonates his campaign. The moment he gets blown out of the water in Florida, he immediately promises McCain his full support



• Thompson enters the race to enthusiastic conservative acclaim, and then throws it all away because he can't be bothered to campaign with it. When Thompson finally does wake up right before the South Carolina primary, he goes on the attack against McCain's chief rival (at the time) Mike Huckabee.



• Thompson drops out of the race and Huckabee drops to third place after South Carolina. Despite being urged by conservatives to either attack front-runner McCain or to drop out to unify conservative support behind McCain's chief rival (at the time) Mitt Romney, Huckabee nevertheless stays in the race and attacks Romney going into Super Tuesday.



• Mitt Romney gets demolished by McCain on Super Tuesday. Mitt Romney then gives an amazing speech announcing the suspension of his campaign in order to help McCain unify the party in the general election. Rush Limbaugh is so impressed by this final speech that he openly asks "Where was this during the campaign?"

We have a nominating contest in which a bunch of loser candidates are practially falling over each other in their zeal to stay out of McCain's way. There are all smart men, but as opposition for the nomination, the Marx brothers could have done a better job stopping McCain's triumphal march to the nomination.

A six-word slogan for liberalism

"Social problems are caused by oligarchs."

Six-word slogans for American are discussed here (hat tip: Instapundit).

A Response to Vox Day, Part 1

In the section of his book "The Irrational Atheist" titled "The Ontological Argument For Science-Inspired Art", Vox Day observes that Richard Dawkins wrote in "Unweaving the Rainbow" that:

By more general implication, science is poetry’s killjoy, dry and cold, cheerless, overbearing and lacking in everything that a young Romantic might desire. To proclaim the opposite is one purpose of this book, and I shall here limit myself to the untestable speculation that Keats, like Yeats, might have been an even better poet if he had gone to science for some of his inspiration.

Even the most cursory of internet searches reveals that John Keats himself would almost certainly not have believed any such thing. Normally, one would have supposed that the statement could be dismissed as pure whimsy, or dismissed as the kind of playful rhetorical slap that has launched a thousand Microsoft Powerpoint presentations. In "The Irrational Atheist", Vox Day perceives mendacity as the motivation behind this statement, and so devotes some few pages of his book to attacking Dawkins on this point.

The purpose of this response is to rescue Dawkins from the Vox's attacks, if possible, or to dispose of as much of the attack as can be demonstrated to be erroneous. The attacks within the section "The Ontological Argument For Science-Inspired Art" are presented as a series of progressively more elaborate statements. To begin, let me address these one-by-one starting with the most expansive.

Vox's attack #1: Secular humanist art is dead

Vox Day makes an appeal to the authority Camille Paglia when he writes:

The inadequacy of science and other secular replacements for religion has not escaped the notice of one of the more enthusiastic champions of the arts, Camille Paglia, who despite her atheism insists that religion is an artistic necessity.

Here Vox defends Keats with the rhetorical equivalent of dropping an atom bomb on Dawkins. The attack here is very simple: if secular humanism in toto is artistically dead, then presumably the scientific subset of secular humanism is artistically dead as well.

First, let's observe that secular art is by no means incompatible with or exclusive of religious art. For the sake of enjoying art as art, the secularist may permit himself temporarily to suspend judgement upon its moral, physical, or other truth claims. So even the atheist connoisseur of art may nevertheless appreciate religion as a component of art, although he may believe that it is not a necessary component of art.

Secular humanism has also traditionally idolized youth and athleticism while insisting that great human drama can be found in athletic competition. I think it goes without saying that the great contemporary athletic competitions of the Superbowl and the secular Olympics, to give only two examples, are still wildly popular despite not being grounded in religion.

Secular humanism also strongly admires science, and again I think it goes without saying that we are living in an era of renaissance of secular science fiction. Just making a conservative listing of franchise science fiction since 1963, we have seen the merged "Alien" and "Predator" franchises (8 films), the "Star Trek" franchise (10 films with 1 in production; 726 television episodes), the "Stargate" franchise (1 film; 289 television episodes at present), the "Dr. Who" franchise (762 televised episodes at present), as well as "The Matrix" trilogy and "Battlestar Galactica". And, of course, there are the six "Star Wars" films -- even Camille Paglia likes "Star Wars" -- which do have a partial degree of religious inspiration in the form of "the Force".

Regardless of what one believes about the greatness of secular humanist art, it should be clear from this abbreviated assessment alone that secular humanist art is far from being dead.

Vox's attack #2: Science is artistically dead.

Vox Day makes this charge when he writes:

Still, Dawkins’s belief in the artistic possibilities of science is rather sweet. It is, as I believe I have read somewhere before, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

First, it is the opinion of many that some scientific results, in and of themselves, are great art. Charles Murray writes in "Human Accomplishment" (pp. 418-419) that:

Beauty can be an integral part of the satisfaction that scientists take in their discoveries. Mathematicians are often attracted to mathematics because of the qualities they consciously see as beautiful. Scientists in every field have been known to fall in love with their work because of the aspects of order and harmony that fall within the realm of the beautiful. Physicists have been known to doubt their results because they were not elegant.

Murray goes on to cite the physical law "S = k log W" as an example of scientific beauty.

There are also long standing genres of historical and pure fiction directly inspired by real-life science and technology. The novel and film "The Right Stuff" and the science-inspired "CSI" franchise stand out as contemporary examples, and, of course, practically every schoolboy knows Sherlock Holmes. Vox also ignores the greatest artistic achievement of science (and arguably of mankind as well): "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

So, having shown that secular humanism in general and science in particular are actually vibrantly alive in terms of artistic potential, what is left of Vox's position that is germaine to Dawkins' original quote above?

Vox's attack #3: Dawkins believes that science can inspire poetry without any evidence.

Vox writes:

It is also worth noting that Dawkins’s insistence that science not only leaves room for poetry but is more capable than religion of inspiring it, flies directly in the face of his claim to suspect any form of argument that reaches a significant conclusion “without feeding in a single piece of [data] from the real world.”

Whether Dawkins believes that science is more capable of inspiring poetry in general is a question that I will refrain from addressing here. The fact that we are living in an era of abundant science-inspired popular art of all kinds is more than enough evidence to conclude, via inductive reasoning, that there is science-inspired poetry being produced out there.

Vox's attack #4: Dawkins doesn't actually cite a poem about science and written by a scientist that is any good.

Ok, Vox, until I can dig up a poem written by a scientist about science that is up to your standards of greatness, you've earned one cookie.

The Vox Challenge

Vox Day issues a challenge to the patrons of Dawkins.Net:

Hence my challenge to the collective you. In the chapter [of "The Irrational Atheist"] entitled "Darwin's Judas", there is a section called "Atheism's Red Queen" which describes seven impossible things asserted by Richard Dawkins. The ebooks will be available later today; I will give the Dawkins.Net crew one week to select seven representatives to respond to each of those seven points and have that representative email me either his response or a link to a site containing his response, which I will then post here in its entirety, followed by my comments. This should be ample time to read a single chapter dedicated to a subject of particular interest to you.

The seven supposedly impossible assertions are nicely catagorized in a series of seven subsections whose titles are:

1. The Ontological Argument For Science-Inspired art


2. Martial Victory Through Blind Obedience


3. Atheist Respect Through Architecture


4. The Inherent Goodness Of Humanity And Moral Gradients


5. The Equation Of Cristian Theocracy With Islamic Fascism


6. Catholicism Is More Damaging Than Child Abuse


7. The Infallibility Of Sam Harris

As you can tell from the titles alone, there are at least a few promising lines of attack here. In the bold spirit of picking up the gauntlets thrown at the feet of others, I'll be posting a few discussions on one or more of these subjects in the next few days.

Perspectives about McCain versus Romney

Right now, the Republican nominating contest for president is considered a two-man race between Senator John McCain and former Governor Mitt Romney, with McCain apparently the inevitable winner. Unfortunately, Conservatives are having a hard time reconciling themselves to the prospect of McCain winning the nomination. There are several different ways that conservatives can rationalize the situtation to determine how they should think about the general election:

• Vote for the lesser of two evils: Rachel Lucas makes the case when she writes (author's italics, overcapitalization, and embedded hyperlinks):

  Just what in the hell kind of crack are Ann Coulter and lots of other conservatives (even the normally brilliant Michelle Malkin) smoking when they say they won’t vote for him if he’s the Republican nominee? Coulter actually said last night on Hannity and Colmes that she would campaign for Hillary instead. Granted, she probably didn’t mean that, but good god damn!
  
  I’ve read several dozen blogs yesterday and this morning, and there are even comments on my own blog, saying that if McCain is the candidate, they won’t vote at all. ARE YOU PEOPLE SERIOUS?
  
  Let me get this straight: you’d rather have Hillary Clinton, a bona fide socialist, liar, all-around bad person, as president. You’d rather have Obama, the senator with the most liberal voting record, as president.
  
  Really? I throw up my hands in disgust. I truly do.




• Every dark cloud has a silver lining: If McCain does win the Republican nomination, he'll have to resign his Senate seat sooner of later. Leveraging McCain out of his Senate seat has been a conservative dream for years! The day McCain leaves the Senate will be a day for conservatives to celebrate.



• The historical perspective: Think of John McCain and Ronald Reagan as a modern day Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan were men who found themselves and their true greatness by identifying with the great cause of human freedom against the forces of tyranny. John McCain is and Henry Clay was an arrogant jerk, ideologicaly promiscuous, fond of compromising with the opposition, loyal to his party, and esteemed as a statesman.



• Revenge: McCain running against Hillary Clinton for the presidency is going to be a lot like Elmer Fudd running against Bugs Bunny for the presidency. No matter what McCain has done to piss off conservatives, spending the next nine months getting kicked in the groin by the Clintons will more than make up for it.

John Edwards dropped out of the race a couple of days ago.

John Edwards's candidacy for president generated so little enthusiasm that I couldn't even be bothered to report on him dropping out until now.