Is a Rhino really better than a Jack Ass?

What do you get when you cross an elephant with a donkey?
Answer: John McCain.
Well, actually, it’s a rhino, but let’s not split hairs here.
Now that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has suspended his 2008 presidential campaign, the door is wide open for Arizona Sen. John McCain to secure the republican nomination for president of the United States in the November general election.
Romney was McCain’s chief competition. Even though former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee showed strong on Super Tuesday, he was still ranked third in the delegate count at the end of the day, and is way behind McCain in this respect.
Don’t get me wrong: I support The Huckster above and beyond McCain. But the fact of the matter is that McCain widened his lead after Super Tuesday and is several lengths ahead of Huck. For the latter to close the gap on the former and ultimately get the nomination would be a formidable task. While anything is possible, it’s just not likely.
Although Huckabee has done exceptionally well among southern states, he’s trailed both McCain and Romney out west and in the north. There aren’t that many more southern delegates left unclaimed, except for Texas, which is probably Huckabee’s last open-door opportunity to make this a real horse race.
All variables aside, though, John McCain will, in all likelihood, be the republican nominee for president in November. Assuming this holds true, I’d like to know what the difference will be between McCain and his democrat opponent—either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama—besides party affiliation? What is it that distinguishes McCain from liberal democrats, other than the fact that he wears the suit of an elephant instead of a donkey?
In matters of policy and ideology, McCain is a lot closer to liberal democrats than he is conservative republicans, who happen to be the base and core of his own party.
He has allowed our southern border to remain open and unprotected, rather than tightly enforced. In 2007, he joined liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-MA, in drafting a bill that would have granted amnesty—what amounted to a free pass—to at least 12 million illegal immigrants who entered our country unlawfully.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, McCain teamed with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-WI, another liberal, to draft and ultimately pass campaign finance law that, ironically, ended up hand-cuffing mostly contributions to his own party and its ability to raise money. Oddly enough, while this same bill put a stop to a lot of republican soft-money contributions, those of democrats were largely unaffected because many contributions to the latter come from IRS-designated and so-called non-profit organizations.
To top it all off, McCain even approached liberal democrat Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, about becoming his vice-presidential running mate in the 2004 general election. Yup, you heard right: John McCain, this year’s republican presidential front-runner, actually considered defecting to the democrat party ticket four years ago.
And we are supposed to believe McCain’s hogwash about reaching out to conservatives in an effort to unite the Republican Party? Bologne.
The only reaching McCain has ever done throughout his quarter-century in the U.S. Senate is across the party aisle to his liberal friends in donkey suits.
He will do as much for his conservative base as George W. Bush has in his eight years as president. Yeah, I know, Bush proposed a ban on partial-birth abortions. Sure, he has been strong on defense and in the War On Terror. And yes, he has been fair on taxes.
But he has also allowed Congress to spend like drunken sailors—the way it always does. He has allowed our borders to go unchecked, undefended and ultimately unprotected from terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, millions of people have crossed our borders illegally. And not all of them are the honest, hard-working sort, either.
Furthermore, Bush has recently supported providing government relief to millions of people who had to default on their mortgages and foreclose on their homes. In other words, he supports paying people for their buying mistakes.
Bush even identified himself in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” which is code for being decidedly more liberal than conservative.
Conservatives have been largely abandoned by Bush and many other Republican Party leaders, among them Sens. Lindsay Graham, Trent Lott and McCain, to name just a few.
If John McCain actually governs as a conservative, should he be elected president, then I will eat my words here. But I don’t count on that for a second. He’s about as true blue as a red-state republican can be without being a blue-state democrat. In fact, if he were to lose his trunk and instead grow donkey ears out the side of his head, I doubt anybody would be able to tell the difference. I mean, McCain might as well just end this whole charade as a rhinoceros and dress in his true colors.
I’m sure John Kerry would agree: the Jack Ass look is quite becoming.