As your longtime source for scurrilous rumors about candidate affairs, I feel obliged to weigh in on John McCain's current predicament, even if I don't have anything especially weighty to say.

My first reaction was, WTF was the Times thinking? It seemed like they had a reasonable story about McCain and lobbyists  which would have been pretty ho hum except for the fact that McCain poses as Mr. Ethics  that they could have dressed up, in paragraph 10, with a fun anecdote: "McCain is so cozy with lobbyists, some of his advisors thought he was having an affair with one!" Instead they ran the story as if they had the goods on the affair, which they didn't, and then weakly tried to back it up with the lobbyist stuff.

Then I wondered if McCain hadn't actually planted this story himself so that we'd all be talking about his, um, vigor. It reminds me of a twist on the old doctor joke.

"As your straight-talking ethics candidate, I've got bad news and good news. The bad news is, I'm in the pocket of big lobbyists." "Oh my God, that's terrible! What's the good news?" "You see that hot blonde who's half my age? I'm fucking her."

Posted by Daniel Radosh