During the primary campaign, I quoted John McCain as saying that "the Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery and oppression." McCain fans sent me e-mails saying that that was quoted out of context. I saw him say it, and it was not quoted out of context. Someone else said it was the result of editing. I have done a lot of tape editing in my time, and this was no edit.

But someone else did say something about that comment which was true. He said McCain had disavowed that statement on his website. He denied it throughout the primary campaign.

Now McCain has come to South Carolina to say, yes, that is exactly what he did say and that is exactly what he did mean.

McCain is so happy. The press is proud of him again.

During the campaign I pointed out that every one of what the press calls McCain's "bold, independent statements" was devoted to catering to liberals. Not once did he defy THEM, and they loved him for it. As the most respectable of respectable conservatives, McCain was crazy about all that liberal praise. It hurt him to have to bow out on attacking the flag during the primary campaign. It disappointed his leftist fans.

For McCain, all is now well. Granted, he admitted to an outright lie. But he gave the media a way to save its old "He's so honest" mantra. He did this by admitting he was afraid he would lose the primary if he came out against the flag back then. So that makes him honest, you see.

This is supposed to charm us and everybody can say what an honest, fearless man he is.

This is how respectable conservatives operate. Last week, I explained how William Buckley wrote a column in which he started off sounding conservative. It said that Pinochet was being kidnapped from Britain and sent to Spain for trial by leftists because he was a rightist who had driven the Communists out of power in Chile. Buckley stated that that no former leftist official would ever be tried for any crime. So he sounded conservative.

But at the end of his column, Buckley insisted that the leftists should have had their way and gotten Pinochet. Like McCain, he sounds conservative or honest at first, but he reserves the bottom line for anything liberals really want. And what liberals really want is that leftist extremists be treated as misguided idealists and rightists as criminals.

By the same token, McCain saves the bottom line for the liberals.

The bottom line is that he said what I heard in the first place. The bottom line is that he lied about it. But betraying the right is what makes him so bold, independent -- and above all HONEST-- in the eyes of the liberal media.

David Irving is a British historian who has written many books minimizing the Nazi slaughter of Jews. He sued a writer for calling him a "holocaust denier." Naturally he lost, and he lost big. In Britain he could not get a jury, so a judge decided it. Can you imagine the future of any judge who did NOT condemn him utterly?

The defense had spent some $3.1 million fighting Irving, and the court ordered Irving to pay the costs of the defense.

Needless to say, Irving has nothing like that much money. But he had asked for contributions during the trial, and a lot of people sent him money to cover his costs. Now the plaintiffs who won the case are petitioning the court to force THOSE DONORS to pay the rest of the $3.1 million!

Here is where this situation becomes so important to us.

I am about the only political writer on the right who has any memory at all. That is why I am so worried about Buckley selling us out on the Pinochet case. The left started this by luring an outright American Nazi to Denmark, and then having Denmark extradite him to Germany. The charges were, among other things, putting Nazi stuff on the Internet which was illegal in Germany, but NOT illegal in the United States where it was done.

This case established the right of the left to prosecute the right for anything it says anywhere. It also ratified the right of Germany to do this only to extreme rightists, and never to extreme leftists.

The next step occurred when Britain agreed to extradite the rightist, but non-Nazi, Pinochet.

As I pointed out in the last article, the respectable conservative William Buckley earned his "respectable" title once again by agreeing that, while no one would ever prosecute a leftist, the left should have the right to grab any rightist from anywhere and prosecute him.

Does anybody anywhere think this process will end with Nazis and ex-dictators? Or will more and rightists find themselves prosecuted?

I know this sounds alarmist and extreme. I have made this sort of prediction dozens of times over more than forty years. In the end, I don't think I was ever wrong. The nightmares I predicted came true.

I warned about the wild extremes to which the left would take a precedent they had established. Everybody agreed I was being an alarmist. I always ended up being right. The left went as far as I said they would.

The only times I was in error was in cases when I myself thought the left couldn't go much further. They always went farther than anyone at the time would have considered possible.

Now let me ask you this: just how far can the left take a precedent which allows them to sue contributors to rightist causes? How long will it be before the suits against gun makers become suits against contributors to the National Rifle Association?

But the right is going to let this slide because of their desperation to keep liberals from calling them names. Leftists can praise Castro, but no conservative dares to defend the rights of someone who says anything they shouldn't say about Hitler.

Hitler is what the leftists always start with, because they know that the word "racist" will throw every conservative down on his belly, drooling for forgiveness for crimes he never committed.

What I say here strikes everyone else as alarmism, I know. But to me it is just a continuation of over four decades of watching respectable conservatives in action, and watching the whole right sign its own death warrant.