"I think that if McCain loses to Obama after they sit it out, they'll be unable to live with themselves"
And I think that if you vote for McCain and he wins, you’ll spend four years either angrily regretting your vote or carrying that backstabber’s water.
I’ll live with myself just fine, Eric. You miss the point: For conservatives, this election is already lost, there being no viable conservative candidate still on the national ballot.
Is McCain less objectionable than Obama? Yes. But from this it does not follow that McCain is acceptable. He isn’t.
Sometimes you lose elections. It happens. For conservatives, this is the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 5, and we lost.
It’s not that we’re sitting this one out. It’s that we played and lost. You don’t keep urging people to vote after the votes have been tallied, there no longer being anything, or anyone, to vote for.
Conservatives will regroup and try again in 2012. But for now, for us, it’s over.
Added. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, writing in 2004:
When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives.