A progressive’s response to conservative Alec Jacobs’ article, “Meghan McCain: The GOP Is Not Your BFF”

Noah Baron, Associate Editor
Ideology: Progressive | Writing From: New Jersey

In his last post, Politicizer guest writer Alec Jacobs denied the fact that the socially conservative wing of the Republican Party wants to banish the center from the party, while at the same time trashing the moderate daughter of former Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, Meghan McCain. Ironically, he’s doing the same exact that he denies happening right now in the GOP. Saying thing such as, “if you’re a Republican and the political left loves you, you know you’re doing something wrong” and “considering McCain’s ‘BFF’ is Rachel Maddow, maybe she isn’t the person we want to be representing the Republican Party” are both prime examples of the hostility by conservatives towards moderates which Jacobs denies exists. For him, having liberal friends makes you an unsuitable conservative. I’m glad that the requirement of having no conservative friends doesn’t apply to liberals or I’d be excommunicated from the left of the Democratic Party in a heartbeat.

In the process of denying any real movement to get rid of the social moderates in the Republican Party, Jacobs dared his readers to provide evidence of Ann Coulter or Michele Malkin calling for the expulsion of the counter-revolution–I’m sorry, I mean liberal elements of the Republican Party for interfering in bringing about, once more, the Glorious Reagan Revolution.

The reality, however, is that you don’t need verbatim calls for such expulsions from the Republican Party when you have so much other evidence that O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, or other conservative pundits want moderates out of the party. I think my favorite example of this was when Ann Coulter promised to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain won the nomination because she believed Hillary to be “more conservative” than McCain.

Or how about when the right-wing of the Republican Party faced the specter of Giuliani (you know, the cross-dressing, multiple-divorce-having, pro-choice-and-not-totally-sodomite-hating candidate) winning the primary? Yes sir, the right-wingers were totally down with having him be their candidate — except they weren’t. In fact, they made many threats of making a third party run. The reality is that “real” conservatives (whatever that might mean these days) simply aren’t comfortable with having someone who isn’t willing to toe their radical party line have any sort of power whatsoever. This is why there is so much hatred for Meghan McCain.

And yet despite the fact that so much of the base of the Republican Party hates her, Meghan McCain seems to be the only one looking out for the future of the Republican Party. You know, a future in which the Republican Party is viable and not dismissed as a bunch of conspiracy theorists. But maybe this is a good thing. Perhaps the United States will wind up with Megan McCain Party (aka, Conservatives in Touch with Reality), the Republican Party (Right-Wing Extremists of America: UNITE!) and the Democratic Party (still unable to organize itself out of a paper bag, one imagines).

Furthermore, I have to add that I’m quite proud of McCain for speaking out against Ann Coulter’s insanity. In fact, Meghan McCain was spot on with her criticism: “offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing.” This is a woman who has compared the United States’ immigration policies to “genocide” (in a wildly ignorant misunderstanding of what the word “genocide” means), who has implied that all muslims are terrorists (and referred to them as “ragheads”), and who has said that Jews are just “imperfect Christians” (yay anti-Semitism!).

To be totally honest, I’m not a big fan of McCain’s conservative economic beliefs. In fact, I’m not much of a fan of the Republican Party. However, I am a fan of reality — and in a world in which increasing numbers of Americans can’t seem to face the fact that our President is an American citizen, there are no such thing as “death panels”, and that secession is not Constitutionally possible, those of us who are fans of reality (Meghan McCain, for example) have to stick together.