K-Lo advises John McCain

Via Hot Air, here's Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner:

If I were him and his campaign, I wouldn't argue he's "the true conservative " (i.e. at CPAC) — that turns conservatives who don't agree he is off. I'd argue, we have differences, my friends — including on the war (Gitmo, interrogation) — but here's why you should rally to me.

"If I were him ...." Sorry, can't finish that sentence.

The breach between Crazy Cousin John and his conservative critics is irreparable. What he did cannot be undone, and it is folly even to imagine it can.

John McCain wants to lead something other than the Republican Party that elected Ronald Reagan to the White House 1981. He is in defiant opposition to the Republican Party that captured Congress in 1994. His campaign is one of unlimited personal vengeance against the Republican Party that rejected him in 2000.

John McCain is out to destroy the Republican Party as we have known it, and he certainly needs no advice on how to do that, given how much he's already done.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat is every bit of 27, which explains why he can write a phrase like "the movement conservative establishment, from Rush and Hannity to the Club For Growth" without imagining the screams of "WTF?" from old dudes like me.

I mean, WTF is Sean Hannity's name doing in the middle of a formula for "the movement conservative establishment"? Hannity didn't get his first radio show (on a crappy college station in California) until 1989, then bounced around until ending up on Atlanta's No. 2 news-talk station in 1992, and didn't get hired by fledgling Fox News until 1996.

So how is it that a guy nobody ever heard of 10 years ago is now part of a supposedly all-powerful "establishment"? That's the kind of mythmaking that springs from the head of a guy as young as Douthat, who was a high-school junior when Hannity was still doing radio in Atlanta, and who thus views a big name associated with a relatively new phenomenon (Fox News) as part of an "establishment."

And the Club For Growth is of even more recent vintage, so WTF again?

Excuse me for being annoyed, but aren't there any grownups at The Atlantic Monthly who can tell these whiz kids that they don't know everything? Douthat just reified this "establishment" in such a way that many of his fellow greenhorns might actually imagine it exists.

UPDATE 9:40 p.m.: You got to hand it Hugh Hewitt. Despite all the ridicule he's taken for being such a homer for Romney, he keeps plugging away:

The fight against McCain-Kennedy in the spring and summer took about two weeks to first organize and then gather overwhelming strength.
The battle against Harriet Miers (yes, I backed the president on the losing side of that one so I recall it well) took a week or so longer.
But once the conservative voice begins speaking as one or nearly one, it is very effective, and that began to emerge on Thursday after the Reagan Library debate.

Indeed. As previously noted, even if polls have failed to register the full effect of the post-Florida backlash against McCain, Don Surber has demonstrated that, with 1,192 delegates needed to win, Tuesday's outcome will likely leave the delegate count at McCain 652, Romney 311.

Romney's still in the game, and with conservative voices loudly protesting the premature coronation of King John, there's still hope.

UPDATE 10:10 p.m.: The miraculous wild-card Giants just knocked off previously undefeated New England in one of the best Super Bowls ever, thus proving that the impossible can happen. But Jim Antle at the American Spectator has no hope:

The conservative establishment came around to Romney too late. ...
That's at least what I suspect. But I've been wrong before. We'll find out soon enough.

Yes, we will. The key for Romney is to knock down this premature "McCain is inevitable" meme.