Now That It's Over...

The delegates (super and otherwise) have spoken. The math is done. There's no need to revisit it.

Senator Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for the Office of the President of the United States.

It was a hard-fought contest and some harsh things were said by both sides and so emotions may still be a little raw on both sides (even on this blog). Fact of the matter is that in this contest between two Democrats, one Democrat won and one Democrat lost. This is one reality that's not going to change.

There'a another reality that isn't going to be changing, either - Senator John McCain is the Republican candidate. He's still there. The big race is not over, in fact it's only just begun. We should be looking at the positions he's taken in his campaign.

This can be found at Senator McCain's website:

[He] believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench.

Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.

However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents only one step in the long path toward ending abortion. Once the question is returned to the states, the fight for life will be one of courage and compassion - the courage of a pregnant mother to bring her child into the world and the compassion of civil society to meet her needs and those of her newborn baby. The pro-life movement has done tremendous work in building and reinforcing the infrastructure of civil society by strengthening faith-based, community, and neighborhood organizations that provide critical services to pregnant mothers in need. This work must continue and government must find new ways to empower and strengthen these armies of compassion. These important groups can help build the consensus necessary to end abortion at the state level. As [he] has publicly noted, "At its core, abortion is a human tragedy. To effect meaningful change, we must engage the debate at a human level."

That's something to ponder. A vote for John McCain will be a vote to endanger the privacy protections guaranteed by Roe v Wade.

Then there's this from his website:

Our freedom is curtailed no less by an act of arbitrary judicial power as it is by an act of an arbitrary executive, or legislative, or state power. For that reason, a judge's decisions must rest on more than his subjective conviction that he is right, or his eagerness to address a perceived social ill.

Which acts as a nice back drop to this new McCain flip-flop from today's New York Times:

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.

What was that again about the "arbitrary executive"?

John McCain - we don't need another four years of Bush policies.