http://southflorida.metromix.com/politics/...

As Sen. John McCain's campaign races toward the Republican nomination, Dan Sweeney doesn't hold back.
By Dan Sweeney
February 13, 2008
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Whatever happens in the next few weeks, the Republican nomination is already a done deal. Sen. John McCain will be the Republican nominee, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, regardless of Gov. Mike Huckabee's weekend wins in Louisiana and Kansas. Even as I turned in my first draft of these ramblings, word came down that Gov. Mitt Romney's campaign was the latest ball of twisted metal to go flying off the road. But he was right to suspend his campaign; McCain had more than twice the delegates of Romney, his nearest competitor, and more than three-fifths of the delegates he needs for the nomination. The Arizona senator could come in second place in every other state primary and still become the nominee. It's all over but the crying. And let me tell you, ace, the sobbing can already be heard in many quarters.

This primary season has seen the Republican Party break into its three big sects: fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and national-security conservatives, as they call them on the cable news shows — or, as I call them, greedy, crazy and paranoid. But McCain pulled in enough of the greedheads and the swirly-eyed Jesus freaks while holding on to his own Strangelovian base that Romney and Huckabee couldn't offer much of a fight. And with his occasional refusal to keep with Republican Party tradition and march in lockstep with his colleagues, McCain has become a loathed figure to many in the conservative movement.

And so it has come to this. The Republican nominee for president is a dour old hack who has giddily sung about bombing Iran and is comfortable with keeping American troops in Iraq for a thousand years. A man who admitted to having a serious rage problem to Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, and in his previous presidential campaign in 2000, said of the Vietnamese, "I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." He later claimed he was speaking only of his prison guards while he was a POW in the Vietnam War. No one believed him.

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