I am officially done. I am tired of fighting the last battle, trying to win a rearguard action when the fight is over. I am laying down my rhetorical rifle and keeping my powder dry for the battles that must be fought, and must be won. My war against John McCain is over.

As much as it pains my conservative brethren to acknowledge it, no matter how it was done, John McCain has become the GOP standard bearer against Barack Obama and he deserves our respect, if not our support. We may not like the way the caucuses and primaries are set up, and changing them would be great, but the system produced John McCain as the winner and we have to accept it. What’s done is done and as much as I dislike many of Senator McCain’s policy ideas, I would much rather wake up on November 5^th with a President Elect McCain than the alternative.

Many of the conservative base have spent a lot of time and effort telling us things about Senator McCain that we already know: he has been way too cozy with the Democrats on too many issues, he has been openly hostile at times towards the conservative base of the Party, he sides with liberal thought on AGW, and we all know his stance on the immigration issue. We also well remember the Gang of 14, McCain-Feingold, and his initial resistance to the Bush tax cut plan. But even with all those negatives, he managed to find a way to win the nomination after everyone had his candidacy dead and buried. He survived that fight and he grabbed the brass ring with both hands, so to speak.

Many conservatives speak of McCain as being no better than Obama, but that is not based on any objective analysis…it based on the enmity that many conservatives have towards McCain. Because of his past actions, they have decided that he can never garner their support, no matter what he does. They have come to the conclusion that because he has voted with the Democrats on some key issues, that he is one of them; what they fail to realize is that McCain is just McCain. He has never represented himself to be anything other than what he is, which is a man who thinks for himself…and the consequences be damned. McCain gets some us conservatives so fired up because he shatters a myth that we have held onto for far too long; the myth that to be Republican means to be conservative.

Yes, the GOP has the reputation for being the home of conservative thought but it has never been a truly conservative Party in my memory. In fact, in my memory the GOP has only produced on real “movement conservative” as President and we all know who that is. And GOP congressional leadership has produced some outstanding conservatives, but they have been more a product of their state/district electorate than of their Party leadership. Many want McCain to embrace that myth, and when he acts on his own initiative instead of the mythical values of the Party he is attacked, instead of people recognizing that McCain is not out of step with us…the Party is.

The problem is that too many conservatives are not worrying about what is best for the country, but are instead worried about salvaging the position of influence that conservatives have had in the GOP. It is all about the idea that if McCain wins that conservative influence in the Party will wane, and we just can’t have that. Who cares if a President Obama, the absolutely most left wing candidate to ever win the Democratic nomination, paired with a Democrat controlled Congress could do serious damage to the Republic? Who cares if a President Obama would be able to replace not just two Supreme Court justices with left wing ideologues in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsburg? And more importantly, who cares if a President Obama packs the federal appeals courts and district courts with the same type of judges? And who cares if we see a Justice Department filled with US Attorney’s in the mold of Patrick Fitzgerald or Ronnie Earle, appointees who will use the office to do the bidding of their political master?

So what if a President Obama would snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq? What does it matter if an Obama administration abandoned Israel, or refused to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression? What’s the big deal if a President Obama would spend all day talking to Iran, while she armed herself with a nuclear weapon?

My friend Philosophocon at his blog sees those arguments as scare tactics to move conservatives into the McCain camp, and discounts them. I see them as legitimate questions that many conservatives are willing to overlook in their nearly blind devotion to opposing McCain. Many conservatives say that an Obama administration could not do that much damage in a four year period, that he would not have enough time to do any lasting damage to the Nation; but they are banking on Obama being so bad that the people will reject him after a four year term. But what happens if the people re-elect him? What then? And we know what kind of damage liberal courts are doing now, so why do we think that federal courts packed with even more liberals won’t do even more damage?

We conservatives have fought the fight for this election cycle and we lost. We split our votes among too many candidates, and our numbers were blunted by the more moderate Republicans who picked a guy and stuck with him. But instead of recognizing the mistakes we made in the primaries, we have decided to punish the winner of the Party nomination. We have spent more time waging war against him for his ideological impurity than we have in going after the candidate who is our ideological opposite! We have been so worried about protecting our ideological turf inside the GOP, that we have forgotten that there is a bigger issue than the fate of the conservative voice within the Party. We are willing to swallow four years of socialist dogma from Obama, under the assumption that it will act as castor oil, when it is much more likely to act as arsenic. It may not kill us immediately, but it may very well cause us a slow, painful death. And we are willing to take that chance not because McCain really is as bad as Obama, but because we have to paint him as such in order to justify our abandoning the field to the opposition.

I am not going to tell anyone how to vote, who to vote for, or question their motivations for their decisions; that’s not my job.  Heck, I’m not even sure how I’m going to vote because I still have my issues with Senator McCain. But I can say that when I go to Forest Chapel Church on November 4^th, get my ballot, and go in to mark it I will not be in there basing my decision on the future influence of the conservative voice in the GOP. I will not be making it on any personal animosity for McCain, nor will I decide on the basis of protecting my “territory”. I will be making it based on the issues that I deem to be the most important, and I will be making it based on what is in my view in the best interest of this Nation.

And I trust that all of you will as well.