Another reminder: don't forget about Rudy

Good explanation why you shouldn't here:
"...as the Republican race journeys down to South Carolina, and then on to Florida — prior to decisive Super Tuesday — Giuliani may be in the best overall shape of any Republican candidate. Giuliani’s advantage over his competitors in key facets of the nomination battle is increasingly overlooked; too little attention has been paid to his financial resources, organization, and electability."

Read the whole thing.

It's just wrong

"Pat Buchanan's American Conservative plays the Nazi card this month with Rudy Giuliani colored in as a storm trooper on the cover."

Mr. Buchanan should know better.

Who's a conservative

An interesting debate going on right now on National Review Online's "The Corner", concerning Rudy Giuliani and other candidates, and who's a conservative. NR's Mark Levin says this: "I believe you are trying to focus us in a way that seeks to limit our observations about Rudy and the meaning of conservatism. I don't blame you. As I said, however, taking conservative positions on certain issues, such as law enforcement, doesn't make you a conservative, in my view. Is Joe Lieberman a conservative because he's strong on national security? I don't know anyone who defines conservatism by cherry-picking issues. I understand why some candidates try it — in fact, to some extent, they're all doing it. But we need not. And my point, underscored by your concluding paragraph, is that Rudy's supporters insist that we do so — as they must. And that's okay, but I dissent. Let me put it this way: what is Rudy's political philosophy? He repeatedly refers to Ronald Reagan, he has appointed Ted Olson to head his judicial advisory committee, but apart from trying to glean his political philosophy through association, what is it?"

Well, but---don't we almost always have to "cherry-pick" issues? Even our greatest American conservative icons, such as Frank Meyer or Russell Kirk, disagreed when on issues, on emphasis, on some fundamentals. James Burnham once endorsed Medicare. Ronald Reagan once as governor of California agreed to tax increases and liberalized abortion laws. Were none of those guys conservatives?

K-Lo at NRO had a very good point on all this:

Rudy as nominee is going to be a problem for a pro-life party — and I obviously encourage people to figure out a solution to that (he either won't be the nominee and someone pro-life will be or Rudy will have to try to solve the problem by teaming up with a pro-lifer with some gravitas —and the promise of a bit of a domestic portfolio — as his veep) but Sean's bottom line is a worthwhile one to bear in mind as friends get hot and angry in 2007: Most of us are going to be uniting behind one of these guys a few months down the road. Hillary must be stopped.

Dumb conservatives

ABC's politics-watchers at "The Note" report today that a few extremist conservatives are upset at the possibility of Rudy Giuliani being the Republican nominee in '08: "The GOP ballot is still filled with question marks -- and the one next to former mayor Rudolph Giuliani's name is growing bigger by the day. This is Rudy's nightmare (and should be just as scary for everyone in a party that's in growing danger of coming apart at its seams): "A powerful group of conservative Christian leaders decided Saturday at a private meeting in Salt Lake City to consider supporting a third-party candidate for president if a pro-choice nominee like Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination," Salon.com's Michael Scherer reports.
"Giuliani is beyond the pale," Richard Viguerie, a veteran conservative activist and author, told ABC's Jake Tapper after the meeting. "Maybe it's just time to never support another Republican establishment candidate, and support principled conservative candidates -- win or lose." This is about Giuliani, but it's also a measure of how former senator Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., has failed to unite/excite/appease conservatives. "In his short time on the campaign trail, Thompson has demonstrated a moderate temperament and an independent streak belying hype that he would be the answer to [James] Dobson's prayers," Tapper writes. "

Even Fred Thompson isn't good enough for them.
This is dumb, just dumb. First of all, Rudy Giuliani, while not perfect, is no liberal; he's an acceptable conservative candidate. I've been presenting evidence on this point regularly over the past months, and will continue to do so. And these guys were all begging Fred Thompson to get into the race---and now suddenly he appears to be unsatisfactory, too.

You know, back in the old days of the 20th century, we used to see just this kind of thing, only it mainly occurred among Communists. They constantly argued over who was the "purest" Marxist, the most devoted to the principles of Lenin, the reddest "Red." Stalinists fought with Trotskyists, Khrushchevian communists fought with Maoist communists, they all battled to expel the heretics and the infidels and to banish impure thought. One of the great founding senior editors of National Review magazine, James Burnham, who used to be a Trotskyite in his younger days, called this kind of thing "sectarian" thought, and worried that conservatives would fall into the same trap. He always tried to warn the Right away from it.

Now I see it happening again. All this kind of third party talk will do is divide conservatives, elect a Democrat (who I guarantee you will do a ton of things that we won't like, and will make the Bush administration look like a conservative heyday), and banish conservatives to political irrelevance. We cannot and must not go down that path.