Moderates Unite As Conservatives Recoil

The point has been made before, but let's make it again: this year is shaping up to be a very dismal one for the rightward chattering class. The elites who sit on the editorial boards of the nation's finer journals of conservative "thought" are positively fainting in prostration over the ascendancy of John McCain.

After last night's debate, NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez insisted that Mitt Romney "came off effective and competent" and that McCain "didn't act like a frontrunner." Meanwhile, her colleague, Mark Steyn, joked about his fellows feeling "demoralized," and went on to rip the "pathetic" McCain for his "anti-Business schtick." Steyn further opined that "Primary triumph doesn't seem to be doing anything to mitigate the small and graceless side of McCain." Over at the allegedly left-leaning hawkfest called the New Republic, McCain was said to have been revealed as "the closet liberal." And Steven Hayes at The Weekly Standard laid the values of the Republican party bare when he declared McCain's line about being "for patriotism, not for profit," as "bad."

Such despondency! Well, I'm guessing the events of this afternoon weren't of much solace to the conservative pointy-heads, either. It couldn't have been fun to watch Rudy Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and McCain stage themselves a Golden State RINO love-fest, in which they gave serious talk to environmental issues. And the event took place as Solar Integrated Technologies, where innovators seek to harness the power of the Sun, whose radical socialist "sunlight redistribution policies" eschews free-market principles and allows sunshine to fall on poor people! Then, as if to add insult to injury, McCain referred to Rudy as his "comrade." Oh, no! Don't rile up the proles!