Legal Commentary

Pap and twaddle from Broder: McCain should save GOP from "extremism"

By Beldar

I can't remember the last time I read anything in a David Broder column that I agreed with, and his op-ed in today's WaPo ? which calls upon John McCain to provide "adult leadership ... for both his party and his country" ? is no exception.

Broder argues that "[o]ne of the conspicuous failings in the past few years has been the absence of a second party making principled decisions on when to support and when to oppose the president." That's patently untrue: It's only GOP support for Obama's continuance of most of George W. Bush's GWOT policies that have kept the Dems from reprising what they did to this country, our allies, and the rest of the world starting in 1974-1975, when they condemned South Vietnam to a brutal and deadly Communist takeover. And the support Obama has gotten from the GOP is not due to leadership from John McCain or anyone else in particular, but because the GOP rank and file in both chambers of Congress understand that a combination of self-abasement and cutting-and-running is the worst possible response to any enemy, certainly including our Islamofascist ones.

There are many positive things that can be said of John McCain, and I'm pretty sure I said them all, many times each, after he'd locked up the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. But 2008 was a year of extraordinarily weak GOP candidates. And the fact that McCain survived a strong primary challenge in 2010 after getting blown out in a presidential election in 2008 doesn't suddenly convert him from an old senator into an elder statesman. Like John Kerry, he's an embarrassingly bad former-nominee who just keeps hanging around the Senate; he gets exactly the respect there which he's due, which is not "none," but which means that nobody else there is much inclined to follow his lead just because of who he is (or was).

I believe in the two-party system even when it's sputtering, and while I never had any illusions about McCain's ample flaws, neither did I ever entertain any illusions that any of the non-GOP alternatives might have been remotely acceptable. (Hillary & Hubby might have turned out slightly better than Obama has, but only slightly, and at what cost in sleaze?) Of the bunch who'd sought the GOP nomination along with McCain, Fred Thompson was by far my favorite, but Fred had nowhere near enough of the proverbial fire in the belly. As a result, he got in too late, and he didn't run nearly hard enough to make up for McCain's advantage (as the runner-up from 2000) in the front-loaded winner-take-all set of early GOP primaries. But Fred was my favorite in substantial part because he was the only major GOP candidate who actually had a long-demonstrated commitment to core conservative principles. As a naval aviator John McCain had the tenacity and courage to resist his North Vietnamese torturers, but as a politician he's too often succumbed to the superficial allure of liberal pap and twaddle.

I'm a big-tent Republican, meaning I welcome the vote and the support of even those voters whose only agreement with me is that an opposing Democratic candidate is, for whatever reason, worse. But welcoming people into the tent isn't the same as pitching the tent's center-pole on unstable ground, which is what we did in 2008: Against the tsunami of willful self-delusion that propelled Obama into office ? and welcome back, by the way, all of you whose eyes have been re-opened, you who persuaded yourself (although you should have known better) that all that "tax and spend/redistribute the wealth/blame America first" stuff was just empty GOP rhetoric instead of fundamental Obama dogma ? we put up a Republican Lite. We needed instead, as we always need, to offer the voters a full-bodied Reagan-style Republican. And there just wasn't one of those available in 2007-2008.

It's the nature of cycles ? political, economic, or otherwise ? that there are bad times punctuating the good. We can only fully appreciate Reagan's greatness, for example, by contrasting him with his disastrous predecessor, Jimmy Carter. And so too it may take the horrors of Obama to prepare the nation to appreciate and embrace another genuinely conservative leader from the Grand Old Party in 2012.

I don't know who that will be yet. But I'm very, very sure that David Broder's instinct ? which is to implore the Grumpy Old Warrior from Arizona (via the Canal Zone and the U.S. Navy) to lead his fellow Republicans to politely acquiesce in the ongoing Democratic rape of our national economy and our international self-abasement before our enemies ? is bonkers. Broder's suggestion that we somehow need McCain to save the GOP from "an experiment in extremism" ? meaning a return to Reagan Republicanism ? gave me the best belly-laugh I've had all week. You want to talk "extremism," I'll show you some genuinely extreme extremism:

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on August 25, 2010 (boomark / email).