Well, there’s a reason I stopped reading The Anchoress about a year ago.

She’s a pain…

SeeDubya,

I’m not telling anyone to shut up, evah. These disagreements are what the primary process is all about. It may not be pretty at times, but if we can’t stand the heat now, we’re toast come November.

As for being grateful for things, what’s so bad about that? :-)

Note on your other post about your efforts to work on Fred’s campaign. I signed up to volunteer locally for Giuliani’s campaign several months ago - not once, but twice. I, too, heard the crickets. But my contact info didn’t go to waste, they did send me letters soliciting $. (Well, I guess it did go to waste because I didn’t send them any money). This was a big red flag for me and a sign that his organization was not the stuff of a presidential/national campaign effort.

Having worked on several political campaigns over the years (as a grunt) I found that the ones that utilize/optimize their resources tend to win, and those that turn volunteers away (or mismanage/underestimate this resource)tend not to.

The best campaign I ever worked on? The Bush campaign in ‘04. Nicest, friendliest, hardest-working, most organized and enthusiastic bunch of volunteers and staff, even the visiting higher-ups. And I never signed up a volunteer whose offer to work for the campaign was unappreciated or rejected as too inconsequential.

When the Fred campaign boasted of signing up 16,000 volunteers on the day he announced in Sept., I couldn’t help but wonder how many/how few would actually be contacted/utilized - and how not getting these boots on the ground several months prior (as some other candidates had)was considered a savvy political strategy.

Anyway, and again for the record, I don’t want anyone to shut up. Quite the contrary.

It seems to me that the Anchoress is railing on those saying that they won’t vote in the Presidential election if McCain is the nominee, not people who are agitating during the primaries.

It seems to me that the Anchoress is railing on those saying that they won’t vote in the Presidential election if McCain is the nominee, not people who are agitating during the primaries.

I’ll be honest: my main reason for being one of those people, since the spectre of a McCain candidacy first arose, was to agitate against him getting the nomination. It would have been better if more people had been as up-front about it at the time — maybe the message would have gotten out sooner.

That said, I’m not going to be one of those who come slinking back and abandons my word. If McCain is the nominee, I won’t vote for him. The only reason anyone can give me for why I should, is to keep Hillary or Obama from winning, and that’s essentially the argument Bob Dole used in 1996 (when he was in every way comparable to John McCain in 2008). I voted for Dole, but he lost anyway.

A lot of Republicans obviously hasn’t learned anything since then.

Indeed, I never tell anyone to shut up. What I am saying is “vote, vote, vote” - don’t give up your right to vote. If you have an imperfect candidate, and your vote can still stave off the advent of something worse until - perhaps - the next generation of conservative candidates is ready to run, then vote.

Let’s see: the vast majority of Republicans opposed the amnesty bill. The Anchoress believes in Reagan’s 11th commandment—as she puts it, “Thou shalt not criticize other Republicans.” Yet she pretty much called amnesty opponents intolerant bigots. Weird.

I might not have the readership/viewership/listenership of the pros, but I’m not paying for my blog hosting just to shut up. I’m seeing fewer and fewer differences between the two halves of the bipartian Party-In-Government, with nearly all of the changes by the “Republicans” toward the Democrats. I’m leaving my write-in options open in the event of a Rudy McCabee nominee, and I’m not committing to Mitt Romney should Rudy McCabee (or a clone) be the VP nominee either.

I invite you to go into my archives and see where I called anyone an “intolerant bigot.”

And - as I’m not really a Republican, and Reagan is not MY idol, I don’t have to follow that dicta. In fact, if you read my piece you’ll see, I didn’t completely agree with it! :-)

Anchoress:

I invite you to read your blog here:

theanchoressonline.com/2006/05/26/illegals-hysteria-the-place-i-cant-go/

theanchoressonline.com/2006/05/16/blog-meltdowns-egos-and-echo-chambers/

theanchoressonline.com/2007/06/06/part-ii-bush-betrayal-the-nations-soul/

and

theanchoressonline.com/2007/06/08/so-loser-wheres-part-iii/

If you can’t figure out why someone might read those entries and say you didn’t “pretty much call amnesty opponents intolerant bigots,” I don’t know what to say.