"A slow acting poison"

It will be interesting to see how many pundits will react to McCain's un-reaction to the Corsi book and his "not putting America first" rhetoric with as much personal disappointment as appears to be the case with Joe Klein.

But there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the "putting America first" front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. There is a straight up argument to be had in this election: Mcain has a vastly different view from Obama about foreign policy, taxation, health care, government action...you name it. He has lots of experience; it is always shocking to remember that this time four years ago, Barack Obama was still in the Illinois State Legislature. Apparently, though, McCain isn't confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary--and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency--what sort of country--that will produce.

Richard Cohen will, no doubt, remind us of McCain's personal heroism. Other pundits will claim he's not in control of his campaign, a fact that is...somehow...redeeming.

But McCain was supposed to be different. The press and the pundits bought into his straight talking double time and his mask of political integrity. They didn't notice that mask slip when he swallowed hard and hugged Bush in 2004. In an case, we'll see if any more follow Klein's angry lead and call McCain on the selling of what little soul he had.

I don't have that problem.

“John’s was the strongest credible voice in Congress supporting the President’s actions against Saddam Hussein,” Lindsey Graham said. “His support was critical.” Some of those closest to McCain thought he was going overboard. His daughter Meghan, a student at Columbia, who voted for Kerry, called McCain and chastised him when she saw him on television making statements she considered baseless. “Once, when John was talking on TV about what a great wartime leader Bush had been, my wife had to leave the room,” Chuck Larson, whose son-in-law has been flying F-18s over Iraq, told me. But many friends point out that once McCain agreed to join the Bush campaign team he would not hold back. “In for a dime, in for a dollar,” he commented to aides, who ribbed him about his role change. Kerry apparently took McCain’s conversion hard. According to a key Democratic strategist, it was not McCain’s rejection that angered him—he had always understood the odds were long. But Kerry had believed that they were bound by a special friendship, first forged in the nineteen-nineties, when they worked together to normalize U.S. relations with Vietnam. And when McCain moved into his political mode—praising President Bush so extravagantly that Kerry seemed diminished by the comparison—Kerry felt betrayed.

[...]

McCain is chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which since last year has been investigating the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his business partner Michael Scanlon, and their dealings with Indian tribes. Abramoff is also the central figure in corruption and influence-peddling investigations by the Justice Department and the Interior Department. All of these have turned up potentially damaging disclosures about trips taken and gifts received by lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Many of McCain’s colleagues were fearful that now, in the Abramoff investigation, he would find it irresistible to cast a wide net, as he had in an earlier investigation into a Boeing tanker deal. In that deal, which was supported by the White House, the Pentagon, and key members of Congress, McCain exposed grievous flaws in oversight. Two Air Force officials resigned, two Boeing officials have gone to jail, the deal was scrapped, and McCain’s reputation as a giant killer was burnished. McCain decided to address members of his caucus in order to calm their apprehensions about the Indian Affairs Committee investigation. “There’s a lot of nervousness among a lot of people in Congress about trips they went on,” McCain told me, “and that’s why I talked to the caucus and explained that this is not a witch hunt. I have a narrow mandate at the Indian Affairs Committee. We’ll be tracing the trail of the Indians’ money, seeing who defrauded them—not looking at records of members’ trips.”