Tag: john mccain

Speaking *as* a neocon hawk who enjoyed Rand Paul’s filibuster…

…I agree with Allahpundit’s reaction to John McCain’s / Lindsey Graham’s reaction to said filibuster:

You would think Maverick might at least seize the opportunity to note that the guy who beat him five years ago did so in part by campaigning on a lie, but that would mean giving an inch of ground to the isolationists on his own side. So instead he sides with O even though everyone from Reince Priebus to Fox News to the Ron Paul fan base to Jon Stewart is patting Paul on the back, and inexplicably he insists on being nasty about it just in case anyone who enjoyed Paul’s performance hasn’t been completely alienated by McCain yet. Question for my fellow hawks: Is this really the hill to die on vis-a-vis paleocon/libertarian foreign policy? Arguing in favor of a president’s power to fire missiles at an enemy combatant on U.S. soil even if he’s a U.S. citizen and isn’t engaged in terrorism at the time when the FBI could just as easily go in and grab him? If that’s a “wacko bird” position, then a lot of people who agree with it will be left wondering whether the entire mainstream rap on libertarians and paleocons as being “fringe” and “extreme” is a lie. Maverick and Graham need to learn to pick their battles.

Continue reading Speaking *as* a neocon hawk who enjoyed Rand Paul’s filibuster…

So I guess John McCain’s gearing up for not running for re-election in 2016.

This is just me guessing.

Ain’t that a shame.

:pause:

I’d post something more, but I’m a) emotionally drained; and b) have been pretty much done with John McCain since 2008 anyway. Hope he has an honorable retirement and I recommend no boots thrown at his head on the way out. The idea is to ease him out of that seat, and replace it.

#rsrh “Come on, honey, bring your mortars! We’re going to a spontaneous demonstration!”

Let me start this by saying the obvious: I am not on Senator McCain’s Christmas card list; he is not on mine; and we’re both no doubt very happy about that.  But as the above quote in the title shows, he is sound on the self-evident absurdity of believing that the assassination of our Ambassador to Libya (and his staffers) was anything except a pre-planned assassination by terrorist groups:

Honestly, the outside world is not your Xbox.  People do not wander around with heavy weapons, waiting for the right moment of social disorder to set them off.  Doing so causes talk.

Moe Lane

PS: Every Republican politician and pundit knows this instinctively.  Even those of us who never served in the military.  That it took the Obama administration so long to work this out for themselves is profoundly… diagnostic.

#rsrh I’ll say it in public, sure: I wish John McCain had won.

And you can assume that I know that he would have infuriated me and other conservatives on a regular basis; that we would have had a knock-down, drag-out internal fight over the fallout from Citizens United; that the Republican party probably would not have cleaned up so thoroughly in the last election cycle; and that right now we’d have to listen to nigh-infinite waves of shuffling Obama zombies telling us that we would have avoided 6% unemployment, $2.60/gallon gas, and $11 trillion debt* if only we hadn’t been such racists.

Yeah, sorry: I still wish John McCain had won, and I’ll say so in public until the cows come home.  I got kids.

Moe Lane

*All three numbers for that alternate were estimated (read: “eyeballed”) under the assumption that McCain would have done pretty much nothing at all, which would frankly have been a better option than the counter-productive imbecility that has been the hallmark of the Obama administration.

#rsrh QotD, Where Was This Attitude in ’08? edition. (NSFW)

Don’t get me wrong: I agree with the sentiment expressed by an unnamed McCain staffer today in regard to watching Team Obama trying to do damage control after the President’s disastrous commentary on the private sector – and possibly even more disastrous spin.

“We very much look forward watching Team Romney put Obama’s head in a vice over this,” he emailed “What goes around comes around, assholes.”

…I just want to know why the heck we didn’t see this attitude more, back in the day. And by ‘more’ I mean ‘at all.’

But I’m not bitter!

Moe Lane

#rsrh Barack Obama, nostalgic over campaign finance reform. …Wait, WHAT?

I’m embarrassed at myself.  I didn’t notice this Victor David Hanson (via Ed Driscoll) pointed this out to me:

[Barack Obama]: It will be coming to a head in this election. We’re going to have as stark a contrast as we’ve seen in a very long time between the two candidates. 2008 was a significant election, obviously. But John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign-finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. There were some areas where you saw some overlap.

What? John McCain actually did believe in “campaign-finance reform,” but candidate and President Barack Obama most certainly did not: He was the first presidential candidate in the general election to renounce public campaign financing in the history of the legislation so that he could go on to out-raise McCain three to one.

Continue reading #rsrh Barack Obama, nostalgic over campaign finance reform. …Wait, WHAT?

The professional malpractice of the 2008 John McCain campaign team, revisited.

This Breitbart article about McCain’s 2008 campaign team is infuriating me far too much for me to write coherently about it for very long, so let me be brief: speaking professionally, I agree with it.  The faction of Team McCain represented by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a Republican Presidential campaign for the rest of their lives.

And I mean it: the main campaign was a collection of professional political malpractice that seemed content to merely put up enough of a fight to satisfy honor, then lose gracefully. While I like and respect most of the people who were directly involved in handling New Media aspects for McCain, it became incredibly clear by the end of the 2008 election cycle that the McCain campaign essentially treated those people with about as much respect as they did us; which is to say, none at all. The campaign would have happily ignored us completely, if they thought that they could get away with it; as it was, they made sure that we knew that our inclusion was both grudging and resented – and literally muted whenever possible.

How bad was it?  Let me put it this way: I’ve already gotten more out of Romney’s campaign than I ever have out of McCain’s – and Mitt Romney isn’t even the official nominee yet.  The bottom line is that it turned out that John McCain wanted to be the nominee a heck of a lot more than he ever wanted to be the President, and while I’m sure that McCain feels that his  team acquitted themselves well in the 2008 general election the rest of us are… somewhat unpersuaded. Continue reading The professional malpractice of the 2008 John McCain campaign team, revisited.

#rsrh Why are we harder on Romney than we were on McCain?

Matt Lewis thinks that he knows the answer: it’s because McCain gave access to the blogosphere and the rest of the New Media, and Romney largely does not.

I think that Matt has a point, here. I will give McCain this: his campaign was always ready to talk with us. They never listened to a damn thing that we told them – to their sorrow – but they at least returned our calls. And why is this important? Matt explains further:

Continue reading #rsrh Why are we harder on Romney than we were on McCain?

#rsrh Free advice to the eventual GOP nominee.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) I don’t care how many memos, deep background revelations, and/or surreptitious back-scratchings take place: former McCain adviser Steve Schmidt’s name will continue to be mud to the activist base of the Republican party.  Hire him for your campaign, and watch enthusiasm for said campaign go off quietly to a corner, cough up a pint of blood or two, and straightforwardly die.

Hey, I’m just the messenger.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Free advice to the eventual GOP nominee.