| LordTheNightKnight said: "You can't win a national election just by pleasing your party base, a trap McCain fell into." He did not. He pissed them off. He did not move to right. You just assumed he did. McCain fell in the polls when the economy tanked, not when the news media twisted his words to make him look like a neo-con. |
Its pretty easy to piss off the portion of your party who accepts nothing less than absolute servitude to their beliefs. And just as many of them were against McCain's past record on principle in spite of the fact that McCain had moved to the right.
Examples: appointment of Sarah Palin (as opposed to his first pick, Lieberman), support of the Bush tax cuts (which he originally voted against), stronger anti-abortion stance (originally supported changing the Republican platform to include certain exceptions, but he renigged on this), stronger rhetoric on appointing conservative judges, moved more to the right on immigration (he actually proposed a fairly modest proposal in 2006), originally against the President's wiretapping program (later chose to support it), used to believe that the enemy combatants detainees deserved some level of judicial oversight (but later sided with the Kafkaesque policies of the Bush Administration), moved to a more pro-torture stance, thought gay marriage should be allowed (but then changed his position), McCain used to be for the moratorium on coastal drilling (but reversed that in line with the drill-baby-drill line of though), and used to be for the cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions.
I think that is enough examples of how McCain shifted to the right to make my point.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
