As far as I'm concerned, that has the hallmark on it. I hate to have come round to this view, but that's where McCain has landed me.

"It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls - a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't define what honor was. Now we know why." ( TPM )

Man. I used to respect him so much. Back when he won the primary, I was so happy. The only decent man in the whole set, and no one ever expected him to win. Now? I don't recognize him. He seems to have been replaced by his own evil twin.

The latest lie put out by his campaign is that Obama wants to teach sex ed to kindergartners . That's a little pathetic. He's apparently adopted the political philosophy of Rove: the person who is willing to do anything to win will pull in all the voters who don't understand the issues. He's also adopted the philosophy of Bush: pick a vice-president the majority of the public will despise even more than they've learned to despise you as insurance against impeachment.

Well, at least we know the measure of the man's desperation to be president, which seems quite strange given that he seems to be pulling ahead in the polls .

I actually think the Dems should calm down and focus on getting the word out about what McCain and Palin---because the choice reflects so badly on him---really are about. Bounce? Bounce? That'll give him his "bounce."

Why do you think he's working so hard at creating a false picture of Obama? His campaign has clocked---a bit too late in the day---the sort of embarrassments in store for them on the Palin pick. They want the public to be equally disenchanted with Obama.

Such is my belief.

At TPM, Josh Marshall writes:

One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is watching the scales fall from the eyes of many of John McCain's closest admirers among the veteran DC press corps. I'm not talking about the freaks on Fox News or any of the sycophants at the AP. I'm talking about, let's say, the better sort of reporters and commentators in the 45 to 65 age bracket. To the extent that the press was McCain's base (and in many though now sillier respects it still is) this was the base of the base. And talking to a number of them I can understand why that was, at least in the sense of the person he was then presenting himself as..... [L]et's face it, John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies. Not just exaggerations or half truths but the sort of straight up, up-is-down mind-blowers we've become so accustomed to from the current occupants of the White House. And today McCain comes out with this rancid, race-baiting ad based on another lie. Willie Horton looks mild by comparison. (And remember, President George H.W. Bush never ran the Willie Horton ad himself. It was an outside group. He wasn't willing to degrade himself that far.) As TPM Reader JM said below, at least Horton actually was released on a furlough. This is ugly stuff. And this is an ugly person. There's clearly no level of sleaze this guy won't stoop to to win this election....(TPM)

Conservative Andrew Sullivan---a former admirer of McCain--- discusses what this final show of irresponsibility, ruthlessness, and reckless disregard of the country's current urgent needs means to him. I am going to quote more than I normally would because it's so important and everyone should read it:

For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign? So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country. And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil. He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.... He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism. And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove. Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. (The Daily Dish)

If McCain does win---which, frankly, I don't believe he will, polls or no polls--- he will be a president like Bush----without honor or respect.

From a coldly political standpoint---a strategic or Rovian standpoint, bereft of my growing anxiety about the GOP's connivance with our nation's plunderers and my sense that our chances may be running out----I find I don't care as much as I should, since we are currently in such dire straits that I doubt anyone can dig us out in four years.

And after he fails to make the country better, stronger, safer, or more respected, or to alleviate the misery of individual Americans, people will doubtless finally get the message: it wasn't just about Bush. The entire Republican party now exists to protect the interests of the current holders of wealth and power. Let him bury his own reputation for honor and truthfulness---which apparently arose from people taking him at his word---along with the truth.

But I think he'll lose. And what history will remember about him is the last part. The part where his reputation lay scrambled on the ground, a sacrifice to his ambition.

More discussion of McCain's great fall.

Posted Here & at Buck Naked Politics:

* Interior Dept. Scandal: Sex, Drugs, Oil...

* FactCheck rips into McCain Camp for Misrepresenting

* If One Planned to Steal an Election, What Would it Look Like?

* Lehman Might Need Bailout, Might not Get it

* Bush's Legacy Embraced by McCain: to GOP the End Justifies the Lies?

* Sarah Palin: Still Telling the $320 Million Whopper About the Bridge to Nowhere?

* Lipstick on a Pig versus Wrestling One