'08 Shocker: John McCain Is Still Alive

Something strange happened during this week before Christmas: Political experts suddenly noticed that John McCain was still running for president, apparently as a Republican.

Weirder still, the excitable senior citizen now has a fighting chance in New Hampshire, where he won the GOP primary way back in 1900 2000.

But a terrible scandal -- perhaps even worse than the "gay sweater" scandal of last summer -- threatens to derail McCain's latest effort to seem promising in New Hampshire before ultimately losing the nomination again.

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Few people remember it today, but John "Walnuts" McCain was kind of a big deal eight years ago.

Sure, it had already been decided back in 1999 that young George W. Bush Jr. would be the Republican nominee. The young Bush had an advantage: Voters thought his name sounded vaguely familiar, and sometimes that's just "the edge" a candidate needs .

But John McCain had rented one of those bus/RV things, and he would sit on that bus and talk, while the bus drove straight. Thus was born the "Straight Talk Bus." This strategy was a hit with reporters who cover the primary elections, so McCain got so much media coverage that a lot of people in New Hampshire thought he was already the president. So they voted for him.

McCain's 2000 campaign was also the first to successfully raise a lot of money online for a presidential race. His failure to get the nomination inspired other Internet fund-raising heroes such as Howard Dean, who also lost the nomination, and Ron Paul, who is already the invincible president of Freedom.

John McCain has been a member of the House or Senate for nearly three decades, and is part of one of America's most powerful military dynasties. Politically, he is best known for eventually coming around to strongly disagree with anything he ever believed. In other words, he's a "maverick."

While conservative voters have never liked him, they also don't like the other bunch of old crooks, slick weirdos, grumbly actors and 9/11 pornographers running for the nomination. McCain is back!

Or is he? The Drudge Report and all kinds of political blogs are covering a new explosive scandal that maybe involves somebody in Congress (McCain) doing some kind of favor for a contributor or lobbyist or something. Think about it.

If word gets out, the voting public may not only decide not to pass on McCain -- they may lose trust in our entire political graft process! And that's why (according to Drudge) the New York Times has bravely chosen to kill the story.

I asked Matt Welch, author of "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick," to explain the significance, and also to sort of put the relevant details in a quote I could use, because I've been doing Christmas traveling for about 60 hours, with young children, and really don't feel like reading a lot of Drudge Report allegations about some lobbying crap. Here's what Welch said:

"The fact that McCain has intervened personally for regulatory relief on behalf of campaign contributors is 'news' in roughly the same way that the Olympic Games are 'news' -- it's something the world pays attention to once every four or eight years, and then promptly forgets."

I demanded some kind of example, for journalistic integrity:


Too bad, indeed.


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