Bitsblog Already Called This One.

Reynolds:

We’ve had eight years of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Before that, we had eight years of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. And though people forget it now, President Reagan inspired a lot of anger and hatred, too. Can I ask that, regardless of who wins, we tone things down a bit?

No.

Absolutely not.

Not a chance in hell, Glenn.

No way.

It’s time to attack, relentlessly and continuously for the next four years anything that Obama does. Anything and everything no matter how trivial, because it’s what the Democrats would do.  They have sewn this little garden, and now they’ll reap the rewards. Being so stupid should be painful, and trust me, it will be.

There’s this, too… you know as well as I do that what Obama will do will cause these United States misery. The whole world knows it, which is why all the Iran, Syria, Russia, Argentina and Cuba wanted the man elected.  So as things fall apart… and they will, under Obama… and as buyers’ remorse sets in, and it will, under Obama… and assuming we as a nation survive Obama… which we may not…the Republicans will be picking up momentum by leaps and bounds… but only if Republicans keep up the pressure.

But there’s something else that’s needful. Real Conservatives at the head end of the Republican party.  Republicans lost the White House because of a lack of a real conservative at the head of the ticket.

I called this one, too.  I quoted and responded to Victor Hanson last February 6th,  who at the time was trying to defend McCain from the Republican base…

Again, the anger apparently derives from his gratuitous past snubbing of prominent conservatives (especially the notion that a rude McCain didn’t need them then, but a conciliatory one does now) and can’t be assuaged. At this point, I take the base’s claims they will sit out – or that Hillary or Obama is no worse than McCain-as genuine.

And given their furor expressed so far on the record, it would be almost impossible for them to recant, and they shouldn’t be defamed or coerced to try. No doubt they will lead the charge in a year or two against the liberal Supreme Court nominations of a President Obama or Clinton, or payroll and income tax increases, or a timetable withdrawal from Iraq. Just as McCain is trying to win them back now, they will try to win back then those who are turned off by the venom expressed against the likely Republican candidate. In either case, it will be nearly impossible to do so.

Given that situation, it seems unlikely that McCain will be elected. Someone as smart and experienced as Hanson will see this with a even little self-honesty applied.

Look; the last several cycles have been hair’s width close, close enough that nobody… and I mean nobody… is going to win without the full support of the base. Sorry, it’s just not going to happen.

Andy McCarthy back then was along the same lines:

McCain has not “admitted his mistakes on immigration.” He has not abandoned the goal of legalizing the status of illegal aliens (his biggest mistake since it incentivizes them to wait it out in the U.S. rather than go home and try to immigrate legally); and he refuses to say he would not sign his disastrous comprehensive reform if it crossed his desk as president.Sen. McCain says he won’t raise taxes, but he also says he opposed the Bush tax cuts because they were not matched by spending cuts – a claim that is demonstrably false (he opposed them on class-warfare grounds – because they benefited “the rich”).

Finally, Dr. Hanson’s point about judges may be the least persuasive of all.

Sen. McCain’s two major legal issues over the past decade have been the suppression of political speech (aka campaign finance reform) and the aforementioned extension of Geneva Convention and other legal protections to alien terrorists. Since 2002, these issues have been the subject of several Supreme Court decisions, most notably McConnell and Wisconsin Right to Life on campaign finance and Rasul and Hamdan on rights for enemy combatants. In each of those cases, McCain’s ardent position was the polar opposite of what he refers to as “strict construction” of the law. In each of those cases, McCain’s positions were adopted by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer – the liberal wing of the court (Justice Souter, by the way, is the gift that keeps on giving whose nomination was championed by Warren Rudman -a top McCain adviser previously floated by the senator as a potential Attorney General in a McCain administration.) The conservative justices the senator claims to regard as models roundly rejected McCain’s legal theories.

So, it’s as I said… he was the better choice, but lost because he’d gone out of his way to snub conservatives, and conservatism.

A look at history is helpful, here… and with that let’s be honest, now… Reagan happened because of the walking disaster that was and is Jimmy Carter.  We now have in Obama someone who comes down to Carter’s left… which is something, I must say, I didn’t consider possible in Presidential politics until recently.  There are many Americans… (in this cycle, they call themselves Obama supporters) … who don’t give a crap about politics until such time as it hits them in the wallet. I’m telling you, people, it will, with Obama, even worse than with Carter…and we need a serious conservative out front to capitalize on it as we did in 1980.

It’s as I said the other night in a Ramble… This blog will have much to write about, no matter who wins. And so we will.   I submit there’s a lot of education between here and there…