"The View" women — joined by Meghan McCain — trash Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo.

The smugness and condescension of these women is irritating as hell, but please watch, so we can talk about this:



There's no balance, with Meghan McCain in lieu of Elisabeth Hasselbeck. McCain is way too eager to win the love of liberals. She says:

Congressman Tancredo went on TV, and he was the first opening speaker, and he said, "People who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House whose name is Barack Hussein Obama." And then he went on to say that people at the convention should have to pass literacy tests in order to be able to vote in this country, which is the same thing that happened in the 50s to prevent African-Americans from voting. It's innate racism, and I think it's why young people are turned off by this movement. And I'm sorry, but revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English.

Now, the funny thing to me about that is, if you think racism is bad, you should also reject the idea that ideas are inborn. And you should reject categorizing people by groups like young and old. People are individuals, and they are what they develop into as they live and act in this world, not what was programmed into their genes. Maybe McCain doesn't know the meaning of the word "innate." Maybe she meant something like "ingrained." She's borderline incoherent, and that's almost as annoying as her need for liberal love (which she's not going to get!).

And, by the way, I think it was foolish of Tancredo to bring up literacy tests. They were used in some parts of the country in the past to keep black people (and poor white people) from voting. There are better ways to say that people were dumb/uninformed, and that's why they voted for Obama, if that's what Tancredo meant to say. Maybe he did intend to resonate with racism, or he has fond feelings about the bad old days. Who knows? In any case, in complaining about people being dumb, he was dumb. Whether he's also suffering from racism is another matter. But if he is, it's not innate racism — which makes him more responsible for it, not less.

Tom Tancredo at the Tea Party convention: "Thank God John McCain lost the election."

"In Tancredo’s view, the Tea Party movement would never have been sparked under a McCain administration because Republican Party leaders and activists would have been muffled from criticizing their president. Meanwhile, McCain would be cutting deals with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid."

Ha. This has resonance for me. On October 8, 2008, I abandoned the "cruel neutrality" stance I had maintained throughout the campaign season and explained my reasons for rejecting McCain:

McCain never presented the conservative alternative to Obama....

McCain has lost definition. He's stumbling along to the finish line, hoping to achieve his lifelong ambition, to seize the crown at last. But why? To show he can get along with Democrats? I worry about what awful innovations the new President will concoct in league with the Democratic Congress, but at this point, I'm more worried about McCain than Obama....

On October 16, 2008, I said:

Is there some sort of idea that if you think McCain is too liberal, you still have to vote for him, because if he's too liberal, then Obama is really too liberal? I don't buy that. Better a principled, coherent liberal whose liberal choices will, if they don't go well, be blamed on liberals than an erratic, incoherent liberal whose liberal choices will be blamed on the party that ought to get its conservative act together.

On October 30, 2008, I said:

Usually, I prefer divided government, but that doesn't mean I need to support McCain. I've seen McCain put way too much effort into pleasing Democrats and flouting his own party, and I can picture Obama standing up to the Democratic Congress and being his own man. What, really, will he owe them? McCain, by contrast, will need them. And we've seen that he wants to be loved by them.

Sometimes, I think that letting the Democrats control everything for 2 years would work out just fine. Let one party take responsibility for everything. When they can't whine and finger-point, what will they actually step up and do? It will be interesting to know. And it will do the Republicans good to retool and define themselves, with an eye toward the 2010 election. I'd like to see this clarification after so many years of obfuscation.

After the election, summing up my 4 reasons for voting against McCain:

3. He never defined himself as a principled conservative.

Think about it. You may not like Obama, but picture, realistically, what would have happened with McCain.