[Update: On Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol stated that sources inside the McCain campaign advised him that John McCain called his aides on Thursday and told them to cease attacks against Palin. Kristol and two named sources in the room with Palin affirmed that the attacks against her, by anonymous sources, were malicious lies.]

Originally published by Mike “gamecock” DeVine as Legal Editor for The Minority Report

The maverick martyr mouthed his own losing recriminations in 2000. Putting country first in 2008 requires anonymous men mangle a mother for a mute McCain.

Moderate republicans don’t win national elections. President Ford was never elected, there never was a President Dole, and there never will be a President McCain.

Republicans win when they run to the right. They began winning when Nixon discovered the Silent Majority and Reagan made the GOP the Party of Life. The winning coalition was solidified when President Reagan won the Cold War with peace through strength and when his Milton Friedman monetary policy and supply-side fiscal policies produced a recovery that lasted for 25 years.

Many of the same Washington voices on the right, albeit slightly on the right, that now attack the Governor of Alaska as a scape goat for republican defeat, also despised The Gipper. Then, as now, there are men without chests that whisper personal attacks.

Reagan was called an “amiable dunce” for calling evil by its name. A towel-clad Palin is said not to know the parties to NAFTA after negotiating a natural gas treaty with one of its signatories.

Some facts: The polls the cocktail party conservatives worship showed McCain behind most of the year. The only time he moved ahead was after he chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate. In fact, while the McCain-Palin ticket rose in the polls after the convention, it was only after the vicious media attacks, including those from the beltway conservative elites, when the republicans actually led. Then came McCain’s refusals to address Obama’s alliances with extremists and lack of bold leadership after the financial crisis.

But before those machinations we heard from David Brooks of the New York Times, a McCain backer since 2000, that Palin was a “fatal cancer” on the GOP and that Obama was the “mountain” of strength that is always there. Former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan describes Palin as a “symptom and expression of a new vulgarism” in American politics. Former Bush 43 speech writer David Frum said that Palin’s appeal was to a “dwindling number of social conservative voters.”

Is Frum referring to the “dwindling numbers” in California, the most liberal state in the nation, that voter to ban gay marriage? Or Florida which also went for Obama but which also amended their Constitution to define marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman? Or the other 39 states that have done the same?

Brooks sees a mountain of vacuousness as Noonan hears vulgarity in g-dropping accents. Yet Brooks is blind to the tumors obscured by Mt. Barack and Noonan is deaf to the echos of The Gipper that conservatives hear oh so clearly from Sarah’s lips.

But when one adds pro-choicers Colin Powell and William Weld to the above, one begins to see what really animates the hate directed at the mother of five. One is reminded of the Rockefeller country clubbers that resented the need for those hick Evangelicals if they were to move past asking Speaker Tip O’Neil for washroom keys. The whispers from the husbands of those whose wives insist upon only pregnancies of convenience that produce flawless heirs.

It wasn’t good enough that Palin, like Reagan, didn’t wear religion on her sleeve. They just decided to go after the cost of her sleeves and the whole dress.

Let’s do the math on why the GOP clingers to Roe v. Wade are bitter at the Mother of Trig. The fact is that for these liberals, a woman that would knowingly bring a Down Syndrome baby to term just doesn’t add up.

These architects of republican defeat can count votes, but one wonders if they just aren’t down with winning unless its with their math, which divides and loses.

The facts refute any claim that Palin or conservatives are responsible for McCain’s latest defeat and their vitriol belies their claim that it is social conservatives that are angry and divisive.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson