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The Feeling is Mutual with McCain

Jimmie | January 30, 2008 | Comments (0)

Who would have thought that talk radio hosts are not exactly brimming with love for Maverick McCain?

Conservative talk radio is ganging up on presidential candidate John McCain, attacking him for joining Democrats to push liberal legislation and opposing bedrock Republican positions from tax cuts to immigration.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appears to be the favorite of conservative talk-radio stars and stands to benefit from their distaste for the Arizona senator, who is running neck and neck with Mr. Romney in the race for the presidential nomination.

Truth be told, talk-radio hosts tend to be more conservative than they are Republican. It’s been common to see folks like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham as Rebublican partisans but that’s not entirely correct. Hannity and Hugh Hewitt are most certainly GOP boosters – you can’t listen to their show and not see that pretty plainly – but most are not. They’re conservatives first and Republicans second. The second the party seriously strays from conservative ideals, folks like Beck, Limbaugh, and Ingraham are quick come down hard on the GOP. If you can’t see that, you’ve not been listening to them. You’ve been buying the fiction from the left about the Right Wing Noise Machine.

More after the jump.

That said, John McCain is about as far as you can be from conservative ideals and still be a Republican. That in itself isn’t really a problem. It’s pretty common for Republicans to disagree, sometimes very strongly, on things. That’s why the GOP is the party of the “Big Tent”. There’s plenty of room inside it for disagreement and they don’t generally brand people as apostate.

The real problem with McCain is the one that Bill Bennett identifies late in the article. It’s not that McCain isn’t a conservative. It’s that when he chooses to buddy up with someone, it’s never a conservative and when he picks a fight, his foe is always conservative. Indeed, it seems that McCain would rather burnish his cred as a “maverick” Republican by attacking conservatives first and not attacking Democrats at all.

I’m reminded of how silent he was when folks like Dick Durbin were comparing our soldiers to the genocidal tools of Stalin and Pol Pot or when Ted Kennedy was accusing our military of reopening Saddam Hussein’s rape rooms. Brave John McMaverick couldn’t be bothered to wade into that fray, oh no. He couldn’t seem to find a television camera then.

Seriously, when can you remember the last time that John McCain so much as went out of his way to say a kind word about a conservative ideal that he wasn’t forced to because of an election? When was the last piece of legislation he supported publicly that was conservative in nature? I think you’d be looking a while for either answer and that is why talk radio opposes him so vehemently. John McCain is openly hostile to everything for which conservatives stand and he has no problem kicking us in the crotch every chance he gets. That’s not someone we need in public office.

So, as far as I’m concerned, talk radio can unload on him every single day until he’s out of office altogether. Go get him, guys. From where I stand, it’d be no big loss.

(Yes, I know the post was mostly about McCain, but if you had the choice to post a picture of John McCain or Laura Ingraham, which would you choose? Yeah, exactly)