Barack Obama may be the hottest politician online, but when it comes to unfiltered Internet commentary, nobody beats John McCain.

D.J. McGuire takes the New York Times to task for their John McCain smear piece and points out that Senator McCain really did a lot of things right.

Ollie North calls it “Decision Time For Conservatives“:

Neither John McCain nor anyone in his campaign asked me to write this column. But I cannot sit silently while my fellow conservatives do to John McCain what GOP “moderates” did to me. Today the stakes for our country are far higher, and the implications for the future are far greater than who sits in one of 100 U.S. Senate seats. Now our nation is at war against a vicious foe. We need a president who has proved how to win it.

QandO’s Jon Henke dissects the Republican Party and where McCain fits.

DJ McGuire compares John McCain’s conservative credentials to Mike Huckabee’s, issue by issue. The verdict? McCain.

Former Gov. and current Senate candidates Jim Gilmore has endorsed John McCain for President.  (h/t Mason Conservative)

Newt Gingrich backs John McCain and warns of a potentially “catastrophic election”.

Former Virginia Governor and Senator George Allen just endorsed and introduced John McCain at CPAC.

Patrick Ruffini gives a breakdown of vote totals for the Republican candidates yesterday:

McCain 3,016,739
Romney 2,369,027
Huckabee 1,610,951

That breaks down to roughly 40% McCain, 32% Romney, 22% Huckabee. Many will say that this shows a majority of Conservative voters don’t like McCain. But that’d disregarding actual figures that show a majority of Huckabee’s supporters think more highly of McCain than they do of Romney.

Using Pew’s figures from earlier this week, if Huckabee’s votes split on the 67/31 favorable break down between McCain and Romney, the results would look more like this:

McCain 3,999,419 (55%)
Romney 3,245,567 (45%)

Looks like a majority, doesn’t it?

The thing is, as much as people want to push back against McCain and question his Conservative roots, Romney isn’t exactly emerging as the standard bearer. People aren’t entirely comfortable with Romney’s brand of Conservatism or how long he’s truly subscribed to it. Huckabee hits the right notes with social conservatives, but fiscally comes across as Jimmy Carter with a Rev. before his name.

As much as it may pain those trying to push back against John McCain, there is a Conservative argument that can be made for him, as Jeff Jacoby made in the Boston Globe over the weekend:

On the surpassing national-security issues of the day - confronting the threat from radical Islam and winning the war in Iraq - no one is more stalwart. Even McCain’s fiercest critics, such as conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, will say so. “The world’s bad guys,” Hewitt writes, “would never for a moment think he would blink in any showdown, or hesitate to strike back at any enemy with the audacity to try again to cripple the US through terror.”

McCain was never an agenda-driven movement conservative, but he “entered public life as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” as he puts it, and on the whole his record has been that of a robust and committed conservative. He is a spending hawk and an enemy of pork and earmarks. He has never voted to increase taxes, and wants the Bush tax cuts made permanent for the best of reasons: “They worked.” He is a staunch free-trader and a champion of school choice. He is unabashedly prolife and pro-Second Amendment. He opposes same-sex marriage. He wants entitlements reined in and personal retirement accounts expanded.

McCain’s conservatism has usually been more a matter of gut instinct than of a rigorous intellectual worldview, and he has certainly deviated from Republican orthodoxy on some serious issues. For all that, his ratings from conservative watchdog groups have always been high. “Even with all the blemishes,” notes National Review, a leading journal on the right (and a backer of Romney), “McCain has a more consistent conservative record than Giuliani or Romney. . . . This is an abiding strength of his candidacy.”

As a lifelong conservative, I wish McCain evinced a greater understanding that limited government is indispensable to individual liberty. Yet there is no candidate in either party who so thoroughly embodies the conservatism of American honor and tradition as McCain, nor any with greater moral authority to invoke it. For all his transgressions and backsliding, McCain radiates integrity and steadfastness, and if his heterodox stands have at times been infuriating, they also attest to his resolve. Time and again he has taken an unpopular stand and stuck with it, putting his career on the line when it would have been easier to go along with the crowd.

A perfect conservative he isn’t. But he is courageous and steady, a man of character and high standards, a genuine hero. If “the House that Reagan Built” is to be true to its best and highest ideals, it will unite behind John McCain.

When you look at the greatest issues facing this nation today (War on Terror, Economy, Education), McCain stands strong, stronger than the rest of the field. Conservatives can get behind that, but first those who aren’t convinced have to see through the “Anyone But McCain” fog.

UPDATE: Time dissects the numbers for both sides.

Also of note, Huckabee supporters break more to McCain than Romney by a huge margin. (h/t Marc Ambinder, from Pew)

PS - “Convince Me Of The Merits Of Mitt”

I’ve been reading Instapundit tonight.

Chris Green (aka STD) wondered why I support John McCain and why I chose now to express it.  It’s a good question and one I answered back in the comments, but I figure I should share it here as well for anyone else who might find themselves scratching their heads:

I had avoided making a full endorsement of anyone because not only was the field too large but my time to actually look into the candidates was limited. Initially I was a Thompson guy, but he looked better when thinking about running than he did once he was in. I have for months considered McCain the candidate to watch. Despite the troubles in his campaign he still held steady in numbers and kept his name around.

Looking at the field, what do you have? Huckabee’s more or less Jimmy Carter, only with less foreign policy experience. Ron Paul is utterly unelectable and out of left field. Romney’s ability to mold his politics to public opinion is amazing.

Immigration is a non-issue for me. Seriously, I don’t care, and I’ll articulate why in the near future. McCain/Feingold was a band-aid to a broken system to which any solution was not going to be taken well. And I don’t see McCain about to push for any restrictions on the Second Amendment, [NRA] C+ rating or no.

John McCain’s foreign policy experience and stand in the War on Terror is stronger than anyone else in the field. His support for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent goes a long way to putting him in solid conservative financial footing. His overall experience trumps anyone else in the field and he has what it takes to not only win the party nomination but take the White House in November.

More later…