It's time for some straight talk, my friends, some real straight talk.

Barring the most unlikely circumstances imaginable, John McCain is going to be the nominee of the Republican Party for President.  He's going to win.

He's going to win, despite, in the words of columnist Tony Blankley, "It would be the first time in living memory that a Republican presidential nomination went to a candidate who was not merely opposed by a majority of the party but was actively despised by about half its rank-and-file voters across the country — and by many, if not most, of its congressional officeholders.  After all, the McCain electoral surge was barely able to deliver a plurality of one-third of the Republican vote in a three-, four- or five-way split field."

He's going to win, despite, in the words of columnist George Will, "John McCain has become the presumptive nominee of the conservative party without winning majority support of conservatives.  According to exit polls, he lost them Tuesday to Mitt Romney in his home state of Arizona 43-40.  He lost them in that day's biggest battleground, California, 43-35....McCain's Tuesday triumph was based in states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California) he will not carry in November."

McCain must now devote serious time and attention to convincing conservatives that he really is one of us, and thus he deserves our support and our votes, particularly given the alternatives.  Whether he makes that sale to conservatives is dependent on so many factors that one's head hurts even to contemplate them, so there is not even a wildly prognosticated answer. 

Regardless of anything McCain says, or even signs in blood, for many conservatives, there will, there must, always be questions of trust.  As New York Post Washington Bureau Chief Charles Hurt writes, "...if history is any guide, the McCain we've seen of late on the campaign trail is the most conservative McCain we'll ever see."

A promise versus history is no easy match to call.

Pragmatists argue that conservatives must convert to McCain as the lesser of evils, in that he could, supposedly, beat either of the Democrats in the general election, and conservative support and influence could hew him true to principle.  Polls do, in fact, currently give support to the former premise, but the dynamics of Democrat election energy do not.  As to the latter, there is a truth ignored.  Once someone gets behind that big Oval Office desk, influence, particularly principled influence, has to stand at the front gate, in the best of circumstances.

Then there are the newly named and congregated suicide voters led, it would seem, by Ann Coulter, who pledge to vote even for Hillary Clinton rather than McCain.

Somewhere in the middle are conservatives good and true who may well just sit out the campaign and, on election day, find that their more pressing priority is tending their gardens on the basis that even four years of wilderness can be rendered pleasant.

On another path altogether are those who do, in fact, pragmatically recognize that offices other than the presidency are also at stake, cumulatively almost as important as the presidency, and plan to put their efforts there.

Those are hard choices, very hard choices, that must and will be made on an individual basis, as they should.  But if conservatism were easy, there wouldn't be liberals.