Yesterday I had a nice long phone conversation with me dear ol' Dad, and after a half hour of chatting about family stuff, the conversation turned to politics, and we discussed John McCain. Well, I guess it's more accurate to say that I got quite an earful on John McCain.

Politics came up when Atilla said that this is the worst election he'd ever seen in his 80 years, and that these are the worst candidates to ever run for the office of President. I hesitantly spoke the syllables "McCain", and after my ears stopped ringing and words like "traitor" and "liar" and "dishonest" stopped reverberating in my skull, I put together that, among other things, McCain is shamelessly exploiting his military service. There are millions of people who've served in the military, and suffered for their country, what's so special about McCain? The general message was clearly that McCain is a Democrat, and a liberal Democrat at that, in sheep's clothing.

The bottom line is that my Dad will refuse to vote in the election if McCain is the Republican candidate.

Fools rush in..."So, you've decided to vote for Hillary Clinton, then?" That didn't get quite the fierce response it might have in past years, McCain's that hateful to my Dad. So I tried an appeal to patriotism--isn't it the duty of an American to pick the best, or at least the least-bad, person to be President? Well, actually, no. Atilla has a strategy, it turns out: Let a Democrat damage the country so badly in two years that we'll gratefully elect a Republican Congress in 2010 to stop McCain, and all will be put right again. The danger should McCain be elected is that, as a RINO, he would deliver everything the "liberal Democrats" wanted, while at the same time real Republicans would be reluctant to vote against him.

I didn't get any traction from pointing how well the Democratic Congress elected in 2006 had done stopping Bush. We segued seamlessly into a glimpse of how Republicans will revise the history of the last eight years: Democrats had blocked each and every one of the wonderful things that George Bush had tried to do for America. But, didn't the Republicans control Congress? Didn't matter, the Democrats filibustered to block everything that Bush wanted. A little more questioning brought up the use of the filibuster to block judicial appointments. I mentioned Roberts and Alito, and the response was Harriet Meyers.

I tried to research the statistics on filibusters, and haven't found anything definitive, beyond this: The Senate approved 208 of 218 of Bush's nominations to the bench during the Republican era, a 95% success rate, apparently higher than any of Bush's three predecessors.

Atilla is a gut-check on Republican feelings, I think. While the punditry pour forth their terawords of bulleted lists and carefully cross-linked citations of grievances against McCain, citing every vote and every statement he ever made, building what amounts to a legal indictment to convict the man in the court of Republican opinion, the bottom line is this: What motivates them? Why have so many RightWing pundits and bloggers and commentators and political leaders seemingly dedicated their lives to destroying John McCain?

Atilla tells it like it is, without all the smokescreen and overly intellectualized argument. It's all about the hate.