Somebody tell me again...

...why we should ride the McCain horse to November? (h/t AlanDP)

As if there wasn't already plenty of evidence that Senator John McCain is the wrong choice for pro-gun Republicans in the Presidential primary, the Columbus Dispatch has added one more item to the list:

The specter of Mike DeWine as U.S. Attorney General.

*snip*

...as a member of the House, DeWine supported the Brady Bill, which required a waiting period and criminal background check before a gun could be sold. When he ran for the Senate in 1994, he backed the Clinton Gun Ban. In 2006, Human Events Online named DeWine among the Top 10 anti-gun U.S. Senators. And shortly before his defeat, DeWine took a position in opposition to legislation which barred gun manufacturers, distributors, dealers or importers from frivolous lawsuits designed to put them out of business.

So, if for some strange reason that ghastly combination made it to power, we would have a President who has taken a dump on the First Amendment and and an Attorney General who would take a dump on the Second. Would I vote for that? Mmmm. Let me think on that. NO. But it seems, alas, that some people might...

Oh, boo-hoo, people. Get a grip. The truth is the GOP had produced several reasonable candidates for the presidential nomination. None are “perfect,” but neither are you. A vote for any of them will require from you an end to the thrust-lip tantrum. You’re going to have to wipe your little eyes, haul up your drawers and - egad - do what Reagan would have done; he would have looked for the candidate who he felt was - taken all-in-all - best for the whole nation, not just for some little one-issue subgroup; he would not simply vote for his comfort zone.

In unserious times, and vacations from history, it is possible to hold oneself aloof from a process and declare, “fiddle-dee-dee, I’ll think about voting next election!”

It cannot be said enough: we are in serious times. In this election you do not have the luxury of complacently waiting for the next bus because you don’t like any of these drivers. In this election, you either get on board and take the damn uncomfortable, bumpy ride with the rest of us, or you marginalize yourself into irrelevancy on your little bench.

That sort of preening, self-righteous horseshit is exactly why I stopped reading The Anchoress long ago. I just couldn't take any more of it. As Mike Hendrix over at Cold Fury said, this "serious times" line gets trotted out pretty much every election and it's wearing quite thin. Furthermore, that whole "looking for the perfect candidate" thing was a straw man if ever there was one, and the people who accuse the dispirited Thompson backers of looking for that perfect candidate ought to be well and truly ashamed of themselves. It's not that any of the other candidates aren't perfect -- indeed, they're all far from it -- but that they don't even rise to the level of good. Fred Thompson wasn't perfect -- witness his since-recanted support of McCain-Feingold and opposition to tort reform -- but along with Duncan Hunter and Ron Paul he was damn good, and about the closest to perfect the GOP field came. The remainder of the GOP field could barely get elected in Texas as Democrats. I know well that politics is going to involve some sort of compromise now and then, but I think I'm just gonna have to borrow Mr. Hendrix's words here because I couldn't have said it any better: "if every conservative principle is to be abandoned one by one because each and every election is just too critical to at last take a stand in support of them, would one of you more mature, moderate pragmatists let me know when you are finally ready to defend them?" As for the Anchoress and her ilk, the whole sorry lot of them can take that attitude, stick it someplace dark and smelly and ride it straight to hell.