The Right Coast blogger Mike Rappaport lists the following bill of particulars against nominating John McCain as the Republican presidential candidate:

1. Not only does McCain support McCain-Feingold, it is one of his signature issues. This will infect many aspects of his presidency, including his appointment of judges. It will be devastating to have a President and a Congress who strongly support this issue at the same time.

George W. Bush signed McCain-Feingold despite believing it to be unconstitutional. I’ll take the guy who believes that the laws he proposes are constitutional over the guy who expediently decides to ignore what he believes the constitution says any day.

2. McCain opposed the Bush Tax Cuts, and what is worse, used class warfare rhetoric to criticize them.

Fair enough. I’d have preferred to see the Bush Spending Cuts than the Bush Tax Cuts, and generally think that we’ve ludicrously expanded the idea of a “middle class” income, but maybe I’m weird that way.

3. McCain has taken strong positions against doing anything about illegal immigration. I don’t believe his recent “conversion” on the issue. For the record, I favor a large amount of legal immigration, but I believe that illegal immigration needs to be addressed.

I think that’s a misstatement of McCain’s position, which after all was initially the same as the president’s.

4. McCain opposes strong interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, for top members of Al Qaeda like Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Yeah, we really need to have another president who supports torture. That will surely help America’s standing in the world.

5. McCain wants to close down Guantanamo.

If you believe the Bush administration’s public statements (nobody does, but that’s beside the point), so do they.

6. McCain favors reimportation of drugs.

Yeah, free trade is a bitch. And Big Pharma is free to stop exporting drugs to countries that reexport the drugs if they aren’t paying a fair market price for them.

7. McCain takes a strong position on opposing global warming. For the record, I think that the evidence probably supports taking some actions now, such as establishing prizes for the development of technology reducing greenhouse gases, but not the kind of strong regulatory actions that McCain seems to support.

8. McCain opposes drilling in ANWR.

Those “strong regulatory actions” include, by the way, actions supported by Mitt Romney too (such as respecting the right of the states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions within their own borders). That federalism’s a bitch too.

9. McCain generally favors regulating American business, including pharmaceutical companies and transportation companies. This is his instinctual reaction to actions he does not like. He does not seem to understand economics. Recently, he spoke about the subprime problem in terms of “greedy people on Wall Street who need to go to jail."

Is there anyone in the race who doesn’t favor regulating American business? Well, except Ron Paul, but his priority is more on keeping brown people out of the country than deregulation.

10. McCain would not be good on judges. Despite his claims to the contrary, there is strong evidence that he would not have appointed Alito. And he is not likely to appoint people who think campaign finance is unconstitutional.

Would anyone other than George W. Bush have appointed Alito?