More McCain?

Only kind of. I've had an ongoing discussion (obsession?) about McCain with another cadet who thinks, like him or not, McCain has a chance of winning the next election. Here is why I think otherwise (although my logic may be convoluted to follow):

• McCain's base is the moderate-to-liberal Republican. He is the "un-politician" which is why those of us near the center (yes, believe it or not, I'm fairly near the center) like him. Because he's near the center, and he's a true conservative, he can't win the theo-cons.
• He can't win the Republican nomination without the religious vote...so, to get the nomination, he will (as he's already shown) pander to the religious vote.
• Doing so, he will lose the moderate and center.
• The far right conservatives (of the true, not religious, meaning) don't like him. He wont cut taxes, he's against Frist's immigration policy and he is, simply, too normal.

Anyway, none of that matters cause it's years off...but for now, I'm enjoying watching the Hindenburg that is the Bush Administration. Here are some quotes from conservatives...yes, conservatives, about Bush recently:

Professor Bainbridge:

It's time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. ... What really annoys me, however, are the domestic implications of all this. The conservative agenda has advanced hardly at all since the Iraq War began. Worse yet, the growing unpopularity of the war threatens to undo all the electoral gains we conservatives have achieved in this decade.

William F. Buckly Jr.:

The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country

An article from the American Conservative magazine:

Failure Is an Option:"Staying the course" in Iraq is a losing strategy

The administration implicitly knows that Iraq is not going well, and it is trying to shape the inevitable postwar debate about who lost Iraq - laying the groundwork for its own version of the Dolchstoss, the post-World War I myth fabricated by German nationalist extremists that the German army was not defeated in World War I but rather was stabbed in the back by treasonous elements at home. Already administration officials are implying that those who question the wisdom of its strategy are undermining the morale of the troops. The clear implication is that open debate about the Iraq War is unpatriotic. When things end badly in Iraq, the White House will claim that the U.S. could have won but its policy was undermined by domestic critics.

Bruce Bartlett:

George W. Bush is not one of them [a conservative] and never has been." On the choice of Harriet Meiers, "the choice of a patently unqualified crony for a critical position on the Supreme Court was the final straw”.