Rachel Lucas has been discussing whether conservatives should hold their noses and vote for McCain:

Serenity, who also comments here and whom I like very much, is the blogger who got me thinking about this particular thing the most. She is good and goddang sick of people telling her that not voting for McCain if he gets the nomination IS essentially voting “for” Clinton/Obama. I don’t blame her for being sick of people questioning her patriotism (she has served in the military) or being annoyed at how some people are such condescending pricks about it. But as she knows, I disagree with her down at the core about the math of this.

In my comments, she described a scenario where you have to pick between a dog that bites you frequently and a dog who bites you more frequently. To her, it’s insane to pick either dog. And I agree that it would be, if you had a choice to have no dog at all. The fact that you don’t get to choose whether you have a dog at all is the most important fact.

She’s right in that those of us who lean toward conservatism or libertarianism do not have a likeable candidate in this presidential election now that McCain is all-but-certain to be the Republican nominee^[a]. She’s also right that, no matter which dog we choose, we’re going to be bitten. The problem is that every two years, our choice of dogs keeps getting worse and worse. If some people believe that, by picking the worse dog, we might convince the Republican party to give us a slightly better set of choices four years from now, I really can’t blame them.

1. Granted, we didn’t have much in the way of a likeable candidate before — possibly not in this entire election cycle, unless you liked Ron Paul or Fred Thompson [↩]