Bill has done some fine work in following up on his original McCain Never post. Read it…and weep. He catches the usual “temper tantrum” shinola from the usual Shit Sandwich Repubs, every one of which glides right over the clearly-stated facts to mindlessly splutter, “but…but…but…at least he’s not a Democrat!” Toren has the response to that pantload of nonsense:

As Bill has patiently tried to point out here for months, if you vote for a Democrat masquerading as a Republican, you are sending the message that the party does not need to put forward conservative candidates any more. Me, I think that’s a very bad message.

This election is the endgame of decades of “defining conservatism down.” John F Kennedy was more conservative than all of the current Republican candidates, bar Thompson and Hunter.

I don’t buy the ooga-booga scare tactics about how bad Hillary or whoever will be for taxes, the war, the Supreme Court, whatever. McCain and his ilk are scarcely better and if rewarded for their positions by election will continue to drift leftwards until the end result is indistinguishable. Right now America is like the frog in the pot of water. I’d rather be the person who cranks the heat up and says “Is this what you really want?” than the person who says, “Maybe we’ll get used to it.”

I’m writing in for Thompson.

The amazing thing to me is how the Republibots, when confronted with the facts about their shiny new golden boy’s positions, simply restate opinions that the fresh-from-the-oven facts in front of their noses wholly refute. “McCain will secure the borders!” Oh? Even McCain himself says he’ll sign the amnesty PoS bill with or without securing the borders. “McCain is stalwart on the WoT!” Well, sure — but only if you consider closing Gitmo, bringing the terrorists there into the American judicial system, and granting illegal enemy combatants full US Constitutional rights “stalwart.”

Bill covers all this and more in his post, and it’s perfectly clear to me that the SSR’s believe the things they do about McCain simply because they desperately wish them to be true; certainly, there is no rational basis for such blind faith in the fantasy that McCain would be “better” than Hillary or Obama. And Billy Hollis posits an important and oft-overlooked point:

But let me explain this difference clearly, once and for all, to those, including some of our commenters, who just can’t seem to understand why our feelings about McCain translate into our willingness to see a Democrat win the presidency instead of him.

With various Democrats, there would be opposition to their anti-freedom impulses, one hopes sometimes fervent opposition. It might not always be effective. They might get some of what they want. But those who believe in freedom would feel free to oppose a Democratic president with any means at their disposal.

But McCain would have no effective opposition for any plans he came up with in four years to subvert the freedom of the American people. The members of his own party would not risk their own positions within the party by doing so, just as the current Republicans caved on Medicare Rx and federalization of education, and almost caved on the immigration bill until a tsunami of popular opposition came along. The Democrats would merely carp that he wasn’t going far enough and vote for it anyway, while laughing behind his back at how they’re getting pretty much exactly what they want.

This, I think, is exactly right. Neither McCain nor Romney can be trusted to hew to their newly minted conservative platform once they’re safely in office.

The GOP has shown itself unfit to be considered the party of principled conservatives, libertarians, and Constitutionalists. They’ve taken those votes for granted for far too long; it’s time they earned them. It’s time they were brought to heel for their betrayal of principle in favor of office-seeking, for their substitution of empty-suit panderers for true statesmen.

Either that, or it’s time for us to look further ahead, and respond in kind to the GOP’s abandonment of anti-statist conservatism and work towards the establishment of a third party that reflects our concerns and values. That, after all, is how the GOP came into existence in the first place, over short-sighted objections that such a third party would never be truly viable.

Once again: no thanks, GOP.

Update! In case you’ve forgotten, here’s more of that lip-smacking strong-on-national-security deliciousness: McCain, on prospectively amending his amnesty bill to exclude flinging down the welcome mat and polishing up the good silver for convicted felons, gang members, and – yep – known terrorists: “This is chickenshit. Fuck you.” Don’t know about you, but I believe I’m getting a distinctive, nose-hair-singeing whiff of turd on toast over here.