Got to disagree with you.
John McCain spent 5 years in a Vietnamese POW camp. He could have walked out, but refused preferential treatment for being an Admiral's son. He's served this country for over 50 years.
Now, yeah, he does some things that annoyed me when I used to be Conservative, like being a needless pain in Bush's ass, and he does some things that annoy me now. And even though I voted for him in 2008, I'm somewhat relieved we aren't in year four of the Iran War, which would have definitely happened on his watch.
But overall, he's a decent guy, maybe the last bastion of sanity in the GOP.
I don't get the idiocy of the Republican voters here. They limit themselves when they reject everyone except the most extreme Teaparty candidates.
Everyone knew McCain was off his rocker selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate just as John Boehner and McConnell are crazy trusting their Teaparty peers in congress and yet they only now become combative and violent about the old guard when they say something true and correct.
The Teaparty is taking steps to gain control in 2014 even over their Conservative counterparts and certainly over Democrats.
Love you Sarah, but I think you are suffering a bit of 20/20 hindsight here.
In 2008, the fissure in the GOP was between the Christian right who supported Huckabee and the Financial Right that supported Romney. McCain couldn't pick one of them as a running mate without alienating the other's supporters.
On Paper, Palin probably looked like a good pick. She was a reformer who took on the corrupt Murkowski machine in Alaska, she was moderate to conservative, took positions against Global Warming, and she was a successful woman.
Yeah, she was dumber than Dan Quayle, but we didn't find that out until later.
Now, since 2008, Palin has allowed herself to be the cypher for the TEA movement. But in 2008, she seemed to be a rising star.
McCain would have been better served picking someone like Tom Ridge who would have m ade him more competitive in the NOrtheast and was a tried and trued, vetted politician.
But the end of the day, it wasn't Palin who did in McCain, it was Bush.