Mi Mea Culpa

Governor Romney,

The editorial board here at Irish Salsa would like to offer its sincerest apologies for endorsing the wrong candidate. After our letter to your campaign, we see you have won Michigan and fought against needless pandering to the left (see Sen. McCain on Taxes, Immigration, Global Warming). While we still believe it to be an incredibly hard battle ahead if you secure the nomination, it's one we would gladly stand beside you and for you and with you till the end. Sen. McCain's hostility, downright hatred for you personally, has turned us off to him even if he were the nominee in the General Election against Sens. Obama or Clinton. We're not guaranteeing we wouldn't vote for him, but right now, we'd be a no-shows at the voting booth. And so we are rescinding our endorsement of him for the GOP Nomination.

He has lied about you, copied President Bush's campaign strategy by calling you a "flip-flopper," forgetting that he did just that in his vote against the tax cuts before he voted for them. He has attacked your wealth; wealth which you earned through the kind of leadership our country is longing for with the current economic news. But worse than everything else, his personal animosity towards you has led him to the transparent motive of scarring you badly enough, that even if you win the GOP Nomination, you'd never recover for the General Election. For that, he deserves to lose. What President Reagan called the 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican," has codified the reality that Sen McCain's words are nowhere near representative of his actions. He is not a Reagan conservative nor a man of character. He is a deceitful panderer to his own self-interest, not much unlike a different former President. His positions with liberals are not out of a conviction of principles but rather a contrivance of political expediency for such a time as this.

And never mind that Gov. Huckabee and Mayor Giuliani seem to dislike you as well. This can be explained because you haven't "paid your dues." What an embarrassment to the Republican Party this has become. Gov. Huckabee truly has no shot at winning, but it is clear his disdain for your religion is keeping him in this race solely to siphon votes from you. If Sen. McCain wins and he chooses Gov. Huckabee as a running mate, we will NOT vote.

Maybe write-in our own names.

We have realized that in electing Sen McCain as President, we would see the same results as we've seen in the Senate. Winning the White House is important, but maybe what's needed is another Barry Goldwater, not a Democrat-lite. Further eroding the principles of conservatism in the name of winning the White House is as defeatist as leaving Iraq prematurely. Conservatism, much like freedom (as the two are similar), is an ideal bigger than party or people. It transcends polls and the media. It's worth fighting and sometimes losing for. In order to further it more. And that has led us to the un-endorsement of Sen. McCain and the strong belief that not voting for him if he is the nominee may be better in the long run for our country.

So it's with this new-found disgust and even greater hope that we are proud to endorse Governor Mitt Romney for the Republican Nomination.