After John McCain’s lackluster presidential campaign in 2008, his daughter Meghan recently has been criticizing conservative commentator Ann Coulter. In fact many moderate Republicans have been criticizing conservatives for years now, and continue to do so, just as conservatives are criticizing moderate Republicans.

But it makes you wonder: Why is Meghan McCain not criticizing Barack Obama or filmmaker Michael Moore or the hard-left congressional black caucus or the radical Hollywood elite, as conservatives like Ann Coulter are? Why is McCain singling out her own party? Because that is the difference between moderate Republicans and conservatives: While both are willing to criticize their own party, moderates are accommodating Obama and the political left while conservatives are calling Obama and the Democrats out.

Here is Meghan McCain talking down her own party:

“It is no secret that being a Republican isn’t the most hip political stance a person can take right now. President Obama has successfully established himself as the hippest politician around. You know you’re big when Katy Perry wears a dress with your face on it to host the MTV Europe Music Awards. To my fellow Republicans: I’m sorry, I wish I could be more positive about the current “hipness” of our party. But being a Republican is about as edgy as Donny Osmond. Granted, being “hip” is not a reason to join a political party, or a reason to agree with its ideals. But it is a way to get the attention of a generation—or, more specifically, my generation.”

So Ms. McCain, a question: Since when is being ‘hip’ at the MTV music awards a criterion for national leadership? Where is your sense of inquiry and curiosity and history? Have you ever tried to hold an intelligent discussion with one of these entertainment-industry types? They’re all dumb as can be.

Meghan McCain has been swept away in a starstruck homage to Obama. In fact many Americans seem to be under the impression that the Republican party and its ideals – limited government, low taxes, morality, piety, patriotism, virtue, hard work, risk and reward – are old fashioned and out of step with our modern world. This comes out of the leftist media drumbeat that we live in an anything-goes world where dependent single motherhood, promiscuous gay sex, divorce, sloth, nihilism, ignorance, atheism, anti-Americanism and all the rest are simply part of the fabric of a rebellious life that some people consider their “right”. And indeed our freedom grants them that right. But it does not grant them the right to send the bill for their behavior to other people.

And these rebellious people ignore the fact that America’s liberty was founded, and is maintained by people of high ideals and restraint who fought against all odds to give us the freest nation ever. And they forget that the utter frivolity of today’s media-driven culture would never have birthed freedom because freedom is not for the self-indulgent and the narcissistic among us, but it is for the bold and the selfless.

In fact liberals and leftists do not ultimately believe in freedom because freedom is demanding of our eternal vigilance, and freedom does not deliver an “equal outcome”, which is their utopian goal.

Freedom means that you have the freedom to succeed or to fail. And the Founding Fathers knew that under freedom that some people would fail. But they considered freedom infinitely more important, which it is. And they knew that under a free economy that those who succeeded would produce enough wealth to accommodate those who didn’t. Just look at the middle-class lifestyles of millions of the idle poor in America today, as productive people foot the bill through higher and higher taxes.

Moderate Republicans have been seduced by the liberal calls for “equality”. And the more that the Republican party goes down that path, the more this will lead to the downfall of Republicanism. Because to agree with liberalism is to be consumed by it because liberalism is entropy like rust, that never stops working. Liberalism is a constant erosion of our freedom under the heavy hand of an incrementally powerful government.

There is a strong liberal force loose in the world today and while it claims it wants “equality” for all nations and peoples it really is a system of government control of peoples’ lives, and redistribution of wealth and power to a leftist elite. This is no different than most of history when governments have taxed their people heavily and controlled their lives and kept them poor and powerless. The world has been socialistic for most of its recorded history.

But continued allegiance to socialism always has, and will continue to lead to war. Just look at Europe, which America is somehow supposed to emulate, according to the dinner-party chatter of doctrinaire liberals. Europe had two world wars in the last 100 years, and the continent was destroyed twice over. Is this the Europe we want to be like?

Beware of how words are used! The American ideal of “equality” is the exact opposite from that of the liberal ideal of “equality”… yet the word is the same.

The American Founders believed that “all men are created equal” not economically or physically or intellectually – which would be impossible – but “equal” in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of God. This is crucial. This is where all of our individual rights emanate from and where our freedom from an oppressive government is based.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that “equality” is not a high intellectual concept but a cultural formula and that only the government truly can make everyone “equal” through manipulation of the nation’s wealth and its institutions… the courts, the media, the universities etc. And this always leads to despotism because it operates contrary to the truly American concept of empowered, equally free citizens.

American conservatives are the anchor holding down the protective tent of freedom with morals, standards and virtues. Conservatives are the scholars who understand what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution really mean. And conservatives know best that that tent easily can be ripped from its mooring in a storm of rhetoric from the left that assures us that some nebulous “equality” is possible under government control. It is not.

This is why we must be alarmed about rich and influential people like Sean Penn and Stephen Spielberg openly praising a dictator like Castro, or why the anti-war crowd so vociferously attacked Bush over his successful campaign against Saddam Hussein. Because many of these radicals admire the iron grip that these dictators have, or had, over their people. And these radicals wish to have the same power over America.

In our debate over the Republican party, many Americans also seem to have forgotten a lot about the recent past. They forget that from 1980 until 2004 that Republicans were winning elections continuously and that it all was started with the strong presidency of a conservative. Ronald Reagan stood foursquare on his principles and in doing so revitalized the American economy and brought down the Soviet Union despite pleas from the left that he change his confrontational and muscular course and accommodate communism.

If these leftists had had their way, Soviet communism would be alive today and the Berlin Wall would still be standing. And if the moderate wing of the Republican party has its way in continuing to incrementally give way to Obama’s hard left agenda, we will see an American Berlin Wall established – between the people and an all-powerful government.

Many Republican moderates are forgetting that the policies that Obama is pursuing, which are being exposed after only 2 months in office, have been tried before and have failed. FDR tried to end the great depression of the 1930s with government spending and it only prolonged and deepened the depression. But somehow these moderates are finding time to disparage conservative critics of Obama, and to give Obama and his ideas “time to work”.

Why? Do they think that over time, that if the Republicans stay in the minority, that the Democrats will make life better for all and share the fruits of power?

Forget it.

John McCain has had a relatively conservative voting record throughout his career, but over the last decade or so he became the liberals’ favorite Republican by being anti-Bush and anti-conservative on certain issues including amnesty for illegals and on campaign finance. He ran in 2008 as a moderate on some issues and a conservative on others. Yet he played a softball game with Obama, strangely as if he wanted Obama to win. McCain could have won the election despite the massive media onslaught against him because Americans were not convinced, and remain unconvinced, about Obama.

Notice, however, that the Democrat party has held to its hard-left course, that it is not currently squabbling openly about that path, that most Democrat office-holders today are socialists who are further to the left than the populace and that they espouse their leftist ideas openly.

Yet when conservatives have the temerity to call out these Democrats and ask the nation to counter their radical leftism by considering core conservative principles of thrift, morality, piety and patriotism, many Republicans, including Meghan McCain, run to the political center to accommodate the socialists.

Why?

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.