John McCain: The Anti-Conservative

John McCain: The Anti-Conservative
By Jed Babbin
In his Florida victory speech, Sen. McCain said, “Our party has always been successful when we have, like Ronald Reagan, stood fast by our convictions." But McCain’s Senate record proves he is not a conservative, far less a principled Reagan conservative.

As Charles Krauthammer said recently, “McCain's apostasies are too numerous to actually count.” And what McCain says about his record is astonishingly misleading.

In recent debates McCain has said he voted against the 2001 Bush tax cuts because they weren’t accompanied by sufficient spending cuts. But in a Senate floor speech in 2001 his reasons were pulled from the Democrats’ playbook. He said, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.” In 2004 he said he was against making the tax cuts permanent. Now he says he favors permanence.

In speeches and debates this year McCain has said – again and again – that he has “learned the lesson” of the failed McCain-Kennedy-Bush illegal immigration “reform” bill he fought so hard for last year. (That failed bill is one of the major points in the New York Times’ endorsement of McCain over his Republican competitors, saying he, “…risked his presidential bid to uphold fundamental American values in the immigration debate.”) Fundamental American values are conservative values. Granting permanent resident “Z visas” and citizenship to illegal immigrants contradicts those values.

The hyperliberal editors of the New York Times liked McCain’s illegal immigration bill so much, they mentioned it twice in the endorsement, praising him for being, “…a staunch advocate of campaign reform working with Senator Russ Feingold, among the most liberal of Democrats, on groundbreaking legislation just as he worked with Senator Edward Kennedy on immigration reform.”

McCain says he understands that the borders must be secured before anything else is done. But last Sunday, when Tim Russert asked him if he’d sign the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, he said, “Yeah,” and then caught himself and went on to avoid a straight answer because the bill wasn’t going to pass. He ducked the question again in the Wednesday California debate. Who believes a President McCain would veto an amnesty bill that Congress passed?

McCain has swallowed the global warming baloney and has introduced legislation to create a “cap and trade” system for American industry. Also in its endorsement of him the New York Times praised his, “…recognizing the threat of global warming early.” In the Wednesday debate, he said that if he was wrong, all that would happen would be that we’d leave our children a cleaner planet. No, senator. You’d also leave the American economy in tatters.

When would a conservative be endorsed by the New York Times over other Republican candidates? To borrow a phrase from Mr. McCain, “when pigs fly.”

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