Which whore will McCain pick?

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - In a show of Republican unity, one-time bitter foes John McCain and Mitt Romney raised money and campaigned together Thursday for a single goal - getting McCain elected president.

"We are united. Now our job is to energize our party," the Arizona senator said in an airport hangar, flanked by Romney and Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., an early McCain supporter. Both have been mentioned as potential vice presidential picks, and McCain praised each.

Romney lauded McCain and promised to do all he can to help, saying: "He is a man who is proven and tested" and without question the right man to be president.

[. . .]

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, dropped out of the race last month after it became apparent it would be near impossible to topple McCain in the convention delegate race. He endorsed the Arizona senator a week later and pledged to help him win the nomination.

Since then, McCain has praised Romney repeatedly as someone who is certain to continue playing a large role in the GOP. Romney, for his part, has suggested that he'd accept a vice presidential slot, though some Republicans privately speculate that he's looking ahead to a possible repeat run in 2012.

Neither man appeared especially fond of the other during the campaign. Romney cast McCain as outside of the GOP's conservative mainstream and a Washington insider who contributed to the problems there. McCain, in turn, argued that Romney's equivocations and reversals on issues indicated a willingness to change his positions to fit his political goals.

And if Romney takes McCain's number 2 spot he will prove that he was never anything but a political whore with no real core values.

I keep hearing that McCain needs to pick a "real" conservative as his running mate. Well that is flatly impossible because anyone who would aid McCain in his purge of conservatism from the Republican party is not a conservative.

Look, no vice president has any real power within an administration unless the president gives it to him. No vice president goes out and contradicts the president's positions on any issue. Look at George H.W. Bush who thought supply side economics were "voodoo economics" but championed them while he was Reagan's VP. The fact that he abandoned them when he became president proves that he never changed his mind about them. He was just lying in order to support Reagan because that is what the vice president does.

Any man, or woman for that matter, who runs with McCain will bury whatever positions he holds and parrot whatever McCain says. If McCain says we need to wreck the nation's economy through "green" legislation to curb non existent global warming then the VP will go out and argue for curbing greenhouse gas emissions - even if he knows that doing this would impoverish the American people.

If McCain says we need a John Kerry-style foreign policy then the VP will go on all the Sunday shows and conservative talk shows and explain why it is important to make the US subservient to the EU in deciding issues of war and peace.

If McCain says we need to have open borders and grant amnesty to the tens of millions of illegal aliens, putting them on a fast track to citizenship so that 70% of them can vote Democrat in every upcoming election then the VP will be out making the case for why the nation must do that very thing to ensure its survival in the complex world of the 21st century.

I repeat. No conservative would lend himself to this. Anyone who shares the ticket with McCain just proves that whatever he was it was not a conservative.