This recent speech by Senator John McCain is nothing less than outstanding. Here’s a taste (but please do read the entire speech):

There is a tendency in our age to accede to the spurious excuse of moral relativism and turn away from the harshest examples of man’s inhumanity to man; to ignore the darker side of human nature that encroaches upon our decency by subtle degree. There are many reasons for this. Blessed with opportunity, and intent on the challenges of work and family, our own lives often seem too full and hectic to take notice of offenses that seem distant from our own reality. There is also the threat in a society passionate about its liberty that we can become desensitized to the dehumanizing effect of the obscenity and hostility that pervades much of popular culture. It is in our nature as Americans to see the good in things; to face even serious adversity with hope and optimism. And yet, with so much good in the world, for all the progress of humanity, in which our nation has played such an admirable and important role, evil still exists in the world. It preys upon human dignity, assaults the innocence of children, debases our self-respect and the respect we are morally obliged to pay each other, and assails the great, animating truths we believe to be self-evident — that all people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — by subjecting countless human beings to abuse, persecution and even slavery.

Confronting evil has never been easy — in our age or any other. But the failure to do so affects even those who are complacent with our own blessings and secure in our human rights. Accepting the degradation of values we believe are universal is to relinquish some of our own humanity. America was founded on the belief in the inherent dignity of all human life and that this dignity can only be preserved through shared respect and shared responsibility. We can retain our own freedom when others are robbed of theirs, but not the sense of virtue that made our revolution a moral as well as political crusade, and which recognizes that personal happiness is so much more than pleasure, and requires us to serve causes greater than self-interest.

That is beautiful and powerful prose, my firends. I am very impressed with both Senator McCain and his speechwriters. Well done, gents. 

Today I give the McCain speech on judges a fairly good grade, but only after exercising my First Amendment right to wail and gnash some teeth for a while first.

If you missed Senator McCain’s “judges” speech, you can now watch it on his website here. 

To those of you who were/are frustrated with Senator McCain because of his involvement with the Gang of 14, I offer you the following quote from Judge Charles Pickering:

There is no way you can look at that agreement as a Democratic victory. Two days after the Deal was announced, Owen was confirmed by the Senate. Two weeks later, Brown was confirmed, and the next day the Senate confirmed Pryor. These confirmations were exactly what President Bush and the Republicans had tried to accomplish for five long years and the Democrats had blocked.

The confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Sam Alito –two exceptionally capable and conservative jurists– were made relatively easy because of the “Gang of Fourteen Agreement.”

(h/t to RNLA - Judicial Blog)

CNN”s Political Ticker has this report:

On the day Democrats hold a crucial primary in North Carolina, John McCain will venture to the Tar Heel State to lay out his vision on what kind of judges he would appoint to the bench.

The McCain campaign tells CNN’s Dana Bash the Arizona senator will deliver a speech next Tuesday at Wake Forrest University designed to help bolster his standing among conservatives with regard to the issue of judges.

Many conservatives took issue with McCain in 2005 for signing on to the so-called “gang of 14″ in the Senate — a bipartisan group of senators who sought to find a compromise on some of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

Oh, and be sure to read the accompanying comments. Here are just a few gems: (more…)

My RedState co-blogger Dan McLaughlin has today’s must-read.

(The link has now been fixed)

LifeNews has this report.

NARAL strongly opposes his candidacy.

[Ed. This is another post from my Alexham archives at RedState. I penned this post right before McCain secured the GOP nomination, and the message remains as true then as it does now: It is time for conservatives to rally around Senator John McCain. To a certain extent, this has already happened; but there are still a few holdouts amongst us (Centinel, I am looking in your direction), and this post is being republished here for their consideration.]  

I know many of you aren’t thrilled about supporting McCain, and some of y’all have even made blood oaths that you will never vote for “that man.” And trust me. I get it. I know exactly where y’all are coming from. For some, it was McCain’s opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts. For others, it was McCain’s cheerleading for patently unconstitutional campaign-finance legislation. For social conservatives, it was McCain’s support for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. And for many, it was all of the above, as well as McCain’s propensity for bucking the Republican establishment and cozying up to liberal dems like Ted Kennedy. Understandably, these things have irked many a conservative, including yours truly. (more…)

I am pleased to announce that today I was elected by the Eighth District Republican Party in Georgia to serve as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Pretty cool, eh?

Minneapolis/St. Paul, here I come!

I may even do some live blogging.

If any of SA’s readers plan on attending, please let me know and we’ll plan a little get together.

Many social conservatives (including yours truly) have, at times, questioned Senator McCain’s commitment to the pro-life cause. Well, last night I was watching Chris Matthews’s Hardball College Tour interview with the good senator, and I must to say that I was extremely impressed with his performance. His finest moment by far, in my humble opinion, was the strong stand he took for a Culture of Life in this country:

(start watching the video at about the 1:35 mark)

Well done, Senator McCain. I am proud to support you.

Say what you will about McCain, but this is evidence of a strong character:

Mr. McCain has largely maintained a code of silence about his son, now a lance corporal, making only fleeting references to him in public both to protect him from becoming a prize target and avoid exploiting his service for political gain, according to friends. At the few campaign events where Lance Corporal McCain appeared last year, he was not introduced.

Well worth reading.

As is Mark Steyn’s dig at Clinton’s “It’s 3 AM” ads.  (”Jeepers, will all business during the Clinton administration be transacted at 3 AM? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal?”)

This is discouraging, to say the least.

But it isn’t helping matters that Senator McCain has declined to reverse course on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Say what you will about President Bush, but on the non-negotiables he was almost perfect. And while Senator McCain’s pro-life record is much. much stronger than Senator Obama’s, the fact remains that his support of federal funding for ESCR is enough for some Catholics to ditch the GOP and return home to the Democratic Party. If this happens, McCain and the GOP are in big trouble.

One of my Facebook friends left this comment on a mutual friend’s “wall” in response to his decision to join a McCain Facebook group:

Did you know McCain can’t comb his own hair?

Not wanting to start a flame war on my friend’s wall, I privately emailed the commenter as follows:

You might have trouble combing your hair as well if you had been tortured for five years.

I love McCain’s new ad:

The Dallas Morning news has this report.

While Senator McCain is far from perfect, he–unlike Senators Clinton and Obama, both of whom are firmly in the pocket of Murder, Inc.–is open to the prolife position on embryonic stem cell research, and firmly pro-life in all other respects. 

John Jakubczyk sums up things nicely, noting:

The important news is that leaders in the pro-life community have an open door to discuss the subject and that the Senator knows we are about what is in the best interests of the nation and the nation’s children.

I think pro-lifers struggling with supporting Senator McCain should also keep in mind that two of the pro-life movement’s most eloquent spokesmen, Professors Robert P. George and Gerard Bradley, strongly support him. If you have any doubts about McCain’s overall commitment to the pro-life cause, I strongly encourage you to read their endorsements of the good senator.  

More to come on this. Much more.

I am not going to mince words. I don’t care for John Hagee, the senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. I realize this may offend some of SA’s evangelical readers, but that’s certainly not my intent; and I hope they will, at the very least, understand why a faithful Catholic might take offense at someone referring to his beloved Church as “the Great Whore,” an “apostate church,” the “anti-Christ,” and a “false cult system” (see also, this video of Hagee spewing his anti-Catholic nonsense).

So, needless to say, I wasn’t exactly thrilled when Senator John McCain, who I strongly support, announced that he was “very honored” by Hagee’s endorsement. It disturbed me greatly when Governor Huckabee associated himself with Hagee by speaking to his Church, and it bothered me as much, if not more, when McCain publicly embraced this joker.

That having been said, let’s consider the facts. Senator McCain strongly repudiated Hagee’s anti-Catholic views, not once, but twice:

We’ve had a dignified campaign, and I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee’s, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics. I sent two of my children to Catholic school. I categorically reject and repudiate any statement that was made that was anti-Catholic, both in intent and nature. I categorically reject it, and I repudiate it. And we can’t have that in this campaign. We’re trying to unite the country. We’re uniting the country, not dividing it.

Now, that may not be good enough for the dems, but I think it is a damn fine statement by the good senator–certainly much more forceful than Governor Huckabee’s comments when he was confronted about Hagee’s views.

To be sure, I would rather McCain completely disassociate himself from Hagee, but his failure to do so (no doubt as a matter of political prudence) is not nearly enough for me to sit out an election that may, among other things, decide who gets to fill as many as three Supreme Court vacancies in the next four years. I mean, seriously, do the dems really believe that faithful Catholics are just going to sit on the sidelines this November because one of McCain’s high-profile supporters is a bigoted twit? Do they honestly think that this sort of thing matters more than Senator Obama’s unwillingness to support legislation designed to provide basic medical care to babies who survive botched abortions?

The bottom line is this: On the non-negotiable teachings of the Catholic Church, Senator McCain is the clear choice for faithful Catholics (even with his deeply troubling support of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research). And no amount of jeering by dems over Hagee’s endorsement of McCain is going to change this fact. Besides, I would think Obama and Clinton supporters have plenty of other things to be concerned about.

(Posted at RedState here)

Senator John McCain issued a press release today noting that “over 100 prominent Catholics nationwide have come together to support John McCain for president” by serving on the “National Catholics for McCain Committee.” The group is led by Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Governor Frank Keating (R-OK), and “is represented by elected officials, businessmen and women, grassroots organizers, students, and Catholic leaders from over two dozen states.”

You may even recognize some of the names on the list.

One of the best political ads I’ve seen in a long time.

And yes, as you can tell from the button on SA’s sidebar, I am supporting Senator McCain for president now. I do so even though he and I have serious differences on issues that are extremely important to me (e.g., embryonic stem cell research). I’ll go into greater detail in the near future, but suffice it to say that my differences with Senator McCain are slight in comparison to those I have with Senators Clinton and Obama.