"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
The speech before a sceptical, partly hostile, audience was a sincere conservative — but not a politically correct conservative — statement. When the Democrats unite on an opponent for the Republican candidate-in-waiting, and if America wants an honest, responsible debate about the war in Iraq, John McCain will be there. Clinton and Obama should consider brushing up on their Burke, just in case. Burke did say that, "A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman." Fits McCain.
The Republican Party is the heir to the Lincoln coalition of Free Soilers, "Conscience" Whigs, abolitionists, prohibitionists, Know-Nothings, subsidized railroad builders, public-works porkbarrelists, tariff-protected industrialists, corporatists, "bloody-shirt" wavers, and Unionists. It is not a conservative party in history and origin, unless you construe its greatest feat, the preservation of the American Union in 1860, to be essentially a conservative cause. (You can argue that either way, but the means, that is, the military conquest of the South and the emancipation of the slaves, were not conservative and would have been unthinkable in 1787.) This is the party that disdained the Democrats as "wet, Irish, and papist." I'm all three. I often vote for Republicans and will likely do so in November, but they are not my tribe.
* * *
Speaking of wet Irish papists, the Irish Burke used to be depicted as a Jesuit by the caricaturist James Gillray.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
