This one popped up in the comment section yesterday – but I figured it was worth asking here (although I know nobody will answer it).<\/p>\n
For years, John McCain was the one Republican who could reach across the aisle<\/em>.\u00a0 From Democrats across the spectrum – from relative moderates, like my Dad (who once said he could have brought himself to vote for Mac) to moderately-sane liberals – said that McCain was someone they could get behind.\u00a0 His American Conservative Union lifetime rating of just below seventy confirmed this: Mac’s correct stances on the budget and defense notwithstanding, he was no doctrinaire conservative. Now, I understand that during the campaign the Tics will say whatever it takes; if the GOP had nominated Mother Teresa or Dennis Kucinich, they’d have called either of them “radical conservatives”, too.<\/p>\n But now that the campaign is over, you still see some of the left’s talkingpointbots repeating “McCain ran to the right!\u00a0 He became too conservative!” in an endless loop, like a piece of computer code with no exception handling.<\/p>\n So Democrats – how<\/em>, exactly, did McCain “become to conservative”?\u00a0 And I’m talking policy statements, here – none of this “he picked Sarah Palin” BS, because he picked Palin to bolster his conservative support.\u00a0 Because he was lagging.\u00a0 Because he had not run to the right<\/em>.<\/p>\n So anyway.\u00a0 ‘spain away.<\/p>\n This I gotta hear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This one popped up in the comment section yesterday – but I figured it was worth asking here (although I know nobody will answer it). For years, John McCain was the one Republican who could reach across the aisle.\u00a0 From Democrats across the spectrum – from relative moderates, like my Dad (who once said he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-conservatism","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAnd then, the moment he got nominated, he became “a radical conservative”.<\/p>\n