Some time back, Rachel Lucas opined about those conservatives/Republicans who were thinking about voting for the Democratic nominee (at the time, everyone assumed the nominee would probably be Hillary Clinton, though Senator Obama’s campaign was starting to put a dent in her “inevitability”). The discussion centered around a metaphor (one that I don’t think was purely Rachel’s, though I could be wrong) where conservative voters were choosing to adopt a dog that they knew would bite them six times a day, because they wanted to avoid adopting the dog they knew would bite them four times a day. Obviously, given the metaphor, you can tell that Rachel thought that this wasn’t exactly an ideal plan for these voters.

Still, there’s some merit in the idea that, by not voting for McCain, conservatives (and those who prefer the idea of a smaller government, which is a group that has some overlap with “conservatives”) might be able to snap the Republicans out of this tendency they have to transform themselves into the “Democrat-lite” party^[a].

The question is, can the country survive years with the six-bite dog? If that was the only issue, I’d say yes, and I’d be happily planning to vote for Bob Barr or some other third party candidate. Unfortunately, it’s not the only issue, because the six-bite dog would simply be the leader of a pack of dogs that are akin to a pack of pirahnas. They will not stop biting until every bit of flesh is gone from your bones.

That link details a plan by Democrats in the House of Representatives to do away with tax deferments for 401(k) retirement accounts^[b], in favor of retirement accounts that would be run by the government and to which workers would be obliged to contribute. Frighteningly enough, this would likely not be the worst of what they would come up with if they had a supermajority in Congress’s two branches and the executive branch.

We must elect John McCain, not because he’s likely to be a good President^[c], but because, no matter how much third-party candidates might wish that it’s not true, he’s the only candidate who has a realistic chance of beating Barack Obama, and we cannot allow the current batch of Democrats to have control over both Congress and the Executive Branch^[d]. To do so is not to simply invite a dog to take a bite out of your arm — it is to stare face to face at a dangerous viper and invite it to bite you.

1. As Venomous Kate said about McCain, he’s too liberal to be considered a conservative and too conservative to be considered a liberal [↩]
2. In the minds of Democrats, that’s a “subsidy”, by the way, just like the subsidy (as commenter “Is” said on that blog post) that you get for everything you purchase because the federal government doesn’t charge you sales tax. It’s like these people think that they are God (you know — everything belongs to God, and tithing is just showing respect to that fact — they think everything belongs to the Government). [↩]
3. I think that previous blog posts here have made it obvious that I think that McCain was by far the worst of a not-particularly-inspiring group of Republican candidates for the nomination. [↩]
4. Granted, this particular plan is not one that belongs to Barack Obama himself, but does anyone really think that he’d veto something that came from his own party? [↩]