"A Conservative's Case For McCain"

I've made the case many times, but Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe reminds us of Reagan's not so conservative past (remember Reagan granted amnesty to millions of illegals for example) and that in the many things that are important and dear to us, McCain comes through for us:

On the surpassing national-security issues of the day - confronting the threat from radical Islam and winning the war in Iraq - no one is more stalwart. Even McCain's fiercest critics, such as conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, will say so. "The world's bad guys," Hewitt writes, "would never for a moment think he would blink in any showdown, or hesitate to strike back at any enemy with the audacity to try again to cripple the US through terror."

McCain was never an agenda-driven movement conservative, but he "entered public life as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution," as he puts it, and on the whole his record has been that of a robust and committed conservative. He is a spending hawk and an enemy of pork and earmarks. He has never voted to increase taxes, and wants the Bush tax cuts made permanent for the best of reasons: "They worked." He is a staunch free-trader and a champion of school choice. He is unabashedly prolife and pro-Second Amendment. He opposes same-sex marriage. He wants entitlements reined in and personal retirement accounts expanded.
McCain's conservatism has usually been more a matter of gut instinct than of a rigorous intellectual worldview, and he has certainly deviated from Republican orthodoxy on some serious issues. For all that, his ratings from conservative watchdog groups have always been high. "Even with all the blemishes," notes National Review, a leading journal on the right (and a backer of Romney), "McCain has a more consistent conservative record than Giuliani or Romney. . . . This is an abiding strength of his candidacy."

This is what I have come to believe. Once the nominees are chosen, once we see clearly the difference in our candidate and the Democrats, I don't believe for one second that so many Republicans who are angry about McCain, will be able to sit home on election day.

Oh, it is easy to say that now. But once it becomes clear the horror that would be a Hillary or Obama presidency, when we understand our warrior's sacrifices will be for nothing if the Democrats capture the Presidency, when we understand how much our military strength matters and how it would be reduced under a Democrat, when we start to focus on what could be yet another bloated bureaucratic government program of health care that will drive down the quality of care for everyone (because when has the govt ever increased the quality and reduced the cost of anything?), when we see all that could be lost here, I don't believe for one second that Republicans will stay home. They will either vote for McCain or they will vote against Hillary/Obama.

Horror will overcome anger.