To start it off, I'll admit I'm a McCain supporter.  Three main reaons: 

(1) We are embroiled in note one but two wars that have not been run well.  This is my top issue because if we lose in these wars, it will turn in to another post-Vietnam era.  We will not be able to credibly protect our interests overseas, the military will lose prestige (a la the Carter era), and we will have destroyed Iraq and left it open to exploitation by terrorists and Islamic extremists.  I believe that we have a moral obligation to succeed in Iraq.  As Colin Powell said, "If you break it, you own it."  We have to protect Iraq now that we have destroyed it.

 McCain is the only candidate with the military experience and the courage to wage these wars in the face of what wil be unbearable Democratic opposition.

(2)  As the title of my blog indicates, I'd like a President that believes what he says.  Even if I disagree with him, at least I know where he stands.  initially I supported Mitt Romney.  I still like him and think he would make a fine President (though not as commander-in-chief).  However, after hearing him debate the abortion issue in 2002 while running for governor of Massachusetts, I can't believe in him anymore.  He panders too much to the crowd.  In Michigan he told the hopeful auto workers that he would get them their jobs back and that he would spend billions to rescue Michigan.  That is not a conservative and that is not someone I can entirely trust.

(3)  I want a president that I can be proud of.  John McCain has a personal history that is compelling.  Whether you agree with his politics, he at least was a courageous hero with an almost religious sense of honor.  We've been lacking that sense since Reagan left the White House in 1988.

Oh, also I like the fact that he can actually win the general election against Hillary.  I guess that's four things.  ("Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear, fear and surprise, our two weapons are fear and surprise and a ruthless efficiency.  Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and efficiency and a fanatical devotion to the Pope.  Four weapons . . amongs our weaponry . . . .)  "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, "  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZQI0Xm29To 

What bugs me most about the opposition to McCain is the lack of thought that goes into it.  The hatred expressed for him is expressed in shorthand to which we are all supposed to fall down, tear our clothes, and wail.  "Amnesty," "Bush Tax Cuts," "McCain-Feingold" all become like words of doom that destroy upon their mere utterance.  

George Orwell brilliantly analyzed this phenomenon in his essay, "Politics and the English Language."  Here is Orwell in discussing sloppy prose:

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. 

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

 When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases --bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy . . . .

Along with all the hatred that comes across (as if John McCain had done something to each of these writers personally), it is the sheer unwillingness to think about what they are saying that bothers me.  I assume there must be some valid reason for the attacks, but so far no one has bothered explaining anything beyond the sound bite/bumper sticker rhetoric so common in modern political writing.  

So here's an invitation.  If you really think John McCain how about picking out one or two reasons why he is so bad for America and rather than relying on cliches you got from National Review or Hugh Hewitt, actually express them.  I'd love to here about it and discuss it rationally.