The passion of St. McCain

Snarky bloggers call John McCain "Saint" because the establishment press worships him. Because he's a war hero. Unlike John Kerry or Al Gore or George McGovern or John F. Kennedy or Walter Mondale. (Gore and Mondale might not be "heroes," but they're veterans.)

But McCain's "story of redemption and rectitude" has more holes in it than Albert Hall, to quote the Beatles and the Firesign Theater. And the McCain campaign's response to this first salvo, which was undoubtedly ginned up by the right-wing McCain-haters' club, invokes the Senator's "hero" status and claims that St. McCain has never "violated the public trust" or "the principles that have guided his career." Well, depending on what those principles might be (e.g., venality, opportunism), the second statement may be true. But I doubt that the first statement really is.

Now we have an allegation, from unnamed New York Times sources from McCain's 2000 campaign, of some potentially Bill-Clintonian behavior with a female lobbyist. If this story plays out to be a sordid mess for McCain, I wonder if you'll see lefties wearing purple band-aids of mockery on their double chins like wingnuts did when the Bush campaign's surrogates repeatedly smeared Kerry in 2004. Heroes....

Rapid-fire update: Wow, now the Washington Post is piling on, too. We may be be headed for a deadlocked GOP convention yet! I'd almost feel sorry for St. McCain if he wasn't such a sleazy and dangerous man. One can almost hear the slabs of plaque spalling off the artery walls right now.