http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGJlNWNmNzA5…

Amen, brother

You're right. Johnny Mac was almost out at one point. He would have remained out had conversatives gotten behind *any* conservative candidate instead of tearing them all down for what amounted to trivial, and often untrue, reasons.

McCain was pretty much all that was left to keep going. Good on him for sticking around and watching conversative knuckleheadedness create the opening he needed to win the nomination. Shame on conservatives for being so silly.

From where I sit, conservatives were just plain stupid during the early primary season.

All right, that's not fair! The reality is McCain was almost wiped out at one point. So while conservatives were not too excited about the others, I think those of us actively following the campaigns were ready to accept any one of the 3 early front runners. If McCain had gained ground sooner & looked like he was going to be a contender, I think you would have seen the base get motivated real quick to block that. But unfortunately, it came to late.

What kind of makes me mad is that as soon as he became the nominee, so many staunch conservatives just jumped on & started demanding that the rest of grow up, suck it up and get behind the candidate. I don't see why we needed to get behind him 2 months ago when the election is still nearly 7 months away. You would think they could hold out a little & try to scare McCain onto the right path. But no, they laid down faster than Paris Hilton.

Duncan Hunter: Nah. Can't win.

Fred Thompson: Not enough "fire in the belly"

Mitt Romney: Too pretty. Too Mormon.

None of the objections to any of these three had a thing to do with policies or principle. IN fact, conservatives had graet things to say about each of these guys, based on their ideas on government and taxes and health care and foreign policy. Every single one of them was stronger on each issue than John McCain.

But we conservatives decided to act like Democrats and vote style and election games over substance and the ability to clearly spell out why those policies are better for our country and for us as individuals.

Now we're left with the dregs and Republicans are smiling all the way to irrelevance.

Now if you are talking about how we ended up with him in the whole grand scheme of things; my personal opinion is that the Republican party has not done enough to enforce party discipline. You know if McCain was over on the Dem side (where he belongs) the first time he didn't vote the party line on a major issue, he would have had a boot up his a**. Also, the Republicans have been playing a little game of us (the base) vs. them for years now. You may not have noticed but even when Repubs had the majority, whenever a core conservative bill was defeated, the Republicans that opposed it were never the ones that were up for re-election. But the ones who were up for re-election soon always voted how the people wanted. Then after their re-election, they would be the ones to defeat critical bills & and others who were next up for re-election would suddenly lurch right. Of course, that is not scientific….just seemed that way to me whenever I would scan through the lists of who voted yea/nay.