Opaque Lucidity

Back To The McCain Mutiny (Sorry, Mr. Wouk)

On a personal note, I'm doing better. I fell three weeks ago today and, though I'm still in a lot of pain, I can tell that I have made significant progress. The hardest part of this entire thing is being home all day with my thoughts, which brings me to today's post.

Over the past three weeks I have spent more time than is probably healthy listening to talk radio, and what I'm hearing is , to put it bluntly, pissing me off. As you know, the race for the Republican nomination for President has come down to Mitt Romney and John McCain. As I write this (pre-Super Tuesday), John McCain stands a very good chance of being the nominee. The Senator from Arizona is considered a RhINO (Republican In Name Only) by many in the party, and with good reason. I won't go into his legislative past here, except to say that he's more conservative than most people give him credit for but he has made some frightful blunders doing business with liberal Democrats.

What I find disturbing is the number of people who claim they will NOT vote for Sen. McCain if he is the Republican nominee, regardless of the consequences. Evidently, the fact that a defection from the party in this form will deliver the White House to Hillary/Obama isn't enough to convince the narrow-minded among us. To them, maintaining the conservative values of the party is more important than keeping the Presidency in the middle of a war.

Senator McCain is not on my top 10 list of men for whom I would like to vote this November. But if he is the Republican nominee, I will RUN to my polling place to vote for him. If you are a conservative and/or a Republican and you do not feel the same way, you are not only demonstrating a poor understanding of Reagan-esque conservatism, you are threatening the well-being of this nation. Period.

Over the past forty-eight hours, I've been playing a scene from The Caine Mutiny over and over in my head. At the end of the film, Lt. Barney Greenwald shows up drunk at the party the USS Caine's officers are holding to celebrate the fact that their old CO, Lt. Cmdr. Queeg, came unraveled on the witness stand and destroyed the prosecution's assertion that the ship's officers were mutinous. Greenwald was the defense attorney and, according to him, he has a guilty conscience. Why? Because he believes that while Queeg obviously had problems, the officers under his command decided early on to not support him. After all, Queeg was not one of them: he was pre-war Navy whereas the rest of the wardroom had joined up after the conflict began. After all, Greenwald pointed out, everyone knew that you couldn't make any money in the military so why the hell would anyone join up? Greenwald's argument comes down to one line, perhaps the greatest of the entire film:

You don't support your captain because you like him; you support him because he's got the job...or you're no good!

It took me a long time to understand what that really meant, and I have to admit that in my youth I did a pretty poor job of living up to it. John McCain, retired Navy captain, US senator and survivor of over five years in North Vietnam as a POW, might end up being the man at the head of my party. I'll support him, if for no other reason than he has the job. Anything else is disloyal.