hypocrites | MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

Today’s shameless hypocrite: Rick Santorum

After a while I got up to go get something from the café cart, and it turns out the guy sitting behind me was Rick Santorum, which makes it all the more fun and all the more interesting. So pretty much the whole trip this guy is working his cell phone, talking to people about how anyone is better than McCain and Giuliani would be better than McCain because then at least he wouldn’t betray the conservative movement… yeah, Giuliani is bad on some issues like abortion, but at least he would stand with the conservative movement. He was saying that there are people like Susan Collins who vote moderate sometimes, but at least she is a team player who always plays with the team and never plays against the conservative side even if she has to give the liberals a vote because she’s from Maine. But McCain will sometimes go against the team even when he doesn’t have to. Anyway, he’s just calling person after person after person on his list, trying to rally them against McCain to give money against him, be uncommitted to the national convention- apparently he was talking to some committed delegates- and he was thinking the best thing for the conservative movement would be a brokered convention, because then at least the conservatives would still have enough pull to pick the nominee.

Call after call after call, speaking in a relatively loud voice, trashing his party’s likely nominee, he says, I probably shouldn’t talk about that on a train, I’ll call you later on that topic. And it really made me wonder how bad the topic could be. At some point I started feeling a little guilty about hearing all this stuff so I turned around, introduced myself, and said “Hey, I’m in politics, I’m on the other side, I’m a Democrat,” in part to see if he would keep doing the phone calls trashing McCain given that a Democratic activist was sitting in front of him. And he did keep doing them, call after call. Apparently, it didn’t bother him at all that a Democrat was listening in as he kept trashing McCain.

There’s more there, of course.

And why does it make me so sick? As Stephen Hayes points out at The Weekly Standard, it’s probably not McCain who should be called “disloyal.”

Although many others have been as critical of McCain, perhaps no one has been as hypocritical. In 2006, when Santorum was running for reelection, he asked McCain to come to Pennsylvania to campaign on his behalf. When McCain obliged, Santorum put the video on his campaign website, listing it first among “key events” of the year. That’s gratitude, Santorum-style.

You know, I’m really sorry I ever sent a dime to that loser’s failed re-election campaign. Obviously it wasn’t only wasted on a losing candidate, it was wasted on a real asshole.

Oh, and before I forget–Mark Levin is a lying fool.

Mark Levin, a longtime confidant of both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who now hosts his own increasingly popular talk show, took the anti-McCain argument a step further on his show last Wednesday. “At this point, anybody who supports John McCain and claims to be a conservative, let me be blunt: You’re not a conservative.”

Which came as a surprise to Jack Kemp, the ardent supply-sider who was the conservative alternative to George H.W. Bush in 1988. “That’s just so preposterous,” said Kemp. “I don’t agree with McCain on several things. He’s gotten right on the economy. He’s right on foreign policy. And he’s right on the war on terror.”

And no doubt a surprise also to Phil Gramm (lifetime ACU rating of 95), whose presidential campaign was endorsed by National Review in 1996. And to Sam Brownback, a stalwart conservative and one of the most outspoken pro-life politicians in America today. And to Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, arguably the most conservative member of the Senate.

“John McCain and I have stood side by side on many issues,” Coburn said in endorsing McCain last week. The most important, he added, are “fiscal responsibility” and the “sanctity of human life.”

It comes as a surprise to me, too. I had no idea that Mark Levin was the arbiter of what being a conservative means! And to think, for all these years I’ve been called a conservative! Oh, wait, maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m supposed to be a dishonest, hysterical, thought-police fool like Mark Levin instead!

And I’m still going to vote for John McCain anyway, whether conservative talk radio hosts and others like Ann freakin’ Coulter like it or not. They don’t speak for all conservatives, no matter how many “no true Scotsman” fallacies they throw out there.