Leave it to Eric Alterman to cut through all the, well, um, stuff and hero worship surrounding Sen. John McCain and his potential (sort of, maybe, but we all know he’s running) bid for hte presidency.
You see, these smart boyz are so much smarter than the rest of us, they know that whatever McCain really says, he’s on their side. It doesn’t matter that his political positions, um, suck. Rather, what matters is how cool he is around reporters.
That about covers it, really.
I am so tired of all this talk about “The Straight-Talk Express” and reporters remembering that quixotic, last-second challenge to the Bush nomination in 2000. John McCain is as conservative as they come, for the most part — anti-abortion, big pro-war guy who wants to send more troops into the quagmire of Iraq, has been kowtowing to the religious right and so on and on and on, ad nauseum.
That so many reporters and commentators, even nominally liberal ones, have fallen for his schtick just goes to show how good of a politician he really is.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 
First of all, McCain is a lock for the \’08 nomination. The fix has been in for two years. He cut a deal in \’04 not to raise a stink about the South Carolina crap and to play ball and be nice to the fundies. So he\’s done it and he\’ll get his nomination in \’08.Second, you described him perfectly.Third, you describe the lapdog press pretty well too. A lot of people are writing about our useless, pointless, elitist lapdog press these days. (Glenn Greenwald and Jonathon Schwarz wrote about it in the last day or two, actually, and Greenwald linked a Schwarz posting from a year and a half ago that is very illustrative–sorry, don\’t have the links at hand).