I am not a McCain apologist. I respect him and tend to agree with him on a lot of issues. However, at this point in time, I don't see myself voting for him in the primaries. That being said, Longman's article was just unfair and untrue.

McCain is a huge liberal.

Actually, he [received has an 82.3 lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union.

But not only has McCain been hostile to Right to Life groups, he tried to have the pro-life plank in the Republican Platform rewritten to include exceptions.

There are a few select cases where he has gone head to head with Right to Life groups like he did in Wisconsin, but it is about campaign reform, and not that he is pro-choice, as you would like to infer. He has very ](http://www.acuratings.org/2006all.htm#AZ)strong pro-life voting record, hardly liberal.

By the way, the law suit was in response to the Wisconsin Right to Life suing the FEC over running ads close to an election. McCain's part in the suit, wasn't even over the issue of the the content of the ad, or even about the ad running, but rather challenging the judges prior ruling that the Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was unconstitutional. But I guess those details were a little inconvenient in a column quickly written to match the author's preconceived opinion.

McCain called evangelical Christian leaders "agents of intolerance" and then later affirmed the anti-Christian views on "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, saying, "I must not and will not retract anything that I said in that speech at Virginia Beach. It was carefully crafted, it was carefully thought out."

He mentioned four people by name, two on the left and two on the right, he wasn't referring to all (or even close to all) "evangelical Christian leaders":

"Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."

Rest of transcript is here. But I guess reading things in context doesn't fit the goal of fitting someone into the mold that Longman would like. I don't necessarily agree with McCain here, specifically about Falwell and Robertson as they themselves have been the victims of much completely untrue press as well and people are quick to believe and spread the bad about someone in the limelight.

That being said, Robertson is actually endorsing Guiliani these days, by far one of the most liberal of the Republican candidates.

Lastly, Longman seems to want to paint the picture that McCain is against our right to bear arms:

Other Republicans, John, said the same things you did, and they didn't vote for gun-control laws.

Again, I would point Longman to do a little research, if in the future he was concerned about being factually honest. He has a pretty strong history of protecting gun ownership.

This kind of dishonesty in our society really drives me nuts.

[UPDATE]: I emailed Andrew Longman a link to this post so in all fairness he would have a chance to respond and/or explain his column. However, it is apparent now that the email listed in his article is invalid:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

columns@andrewlongman.com

Technical details of permanent failure: 
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