Sex, Lies and Republicans

"Wrong answer, Governor. First off, your service on the board would seem to be all about business practices. What about that enterprising young teenager flipping through the televised offerings in his hotel room while the parents are down at the pool?"

I'm sorry, that is a huuuuge stretch. (The Thompson part has to do with his lack of recollection of consulting with a pro-choice group in the early 1990s.)

Hmmm . . . I wonder how Supreme Court Justice Harriet Miers would have ruled in the case of Harriet Miers defying a congressional subpoena to testify in the fired prosecutors case.

The McCain post-mortems are flying everywhere in the wake of his staff shakeup. Time's Jay Carney says it was unrealistic for McCain to think he'd get good press this time around:

"A frequent complaint one heard from the McCain campaign in recent months was that the national press had turned against them, that the coverage of their guy had become hostile, unfair and unbalanced. Putting aside the irony of that charge (in 2000 McCain and his aides used to say, only half in jest, that 'the press is our base'), there was at least some truth underlying it. The tone of McCain's press did change -- but not because he made peace with Jerry Falwell or voted in favor of extending tax cuts that he'd previously voted against or because of any of the other midsize transgressions cited in all the stories documenting McCain's rough transition from insurgent candidate to establishment frontrunner. The coverage changed, I think, almost entirely because of Iraq.

"The campaign thought the Senator's stand on Iraq would be an asset in his bid for the GOP nomination. It would reassure conservatives by showing McCain to be President Bush's closest ally on the most important issue of the day, and it would demonstrate yet again that McCain was a politician of high principle, willing to take a stand for what he believed to be right in the face of stark opposition. Sure the war was increasingly unpopular with the general public, the thinking went, but that only proved their point that McCain was just being McCain, the principled maverick.

"Such was the campaign's wishful thinking. It's one thing to take an unpopular stand on an issue of moderate importance. The press often -- and the public occasionally -- rewards politicians who go against the grain. But Iraq is not just any issue. There is a serious national debate over whether Bush's invasion of Iraq is the biggest foreign policy fiasco in more than a generation, if not since the dawn of the Republic. At the moment, Bush (and, by extension, McCain) are on the losing side of that debate. The expectation that the press would acclaim McCain's steadfastness on Iraq and leave it at that was misguided. The issue is simply too monumental, especially for a candidate basing his campaign in large part on his national security credentials."

In other words, journalists only reward a maverick when he agrees with their positions?

Now the New York Times is questioning whether McCain broke the law by making a fundraising call just off the Senate floor. Talk about a bad week.

Bush didn't break much ground with his war speech Tuesday, and Slate's Fred Kaplan is distinctly unimpressed:

"It was, even by his standards, an unusually rambling speech, alternately folksy and haranguing, most of it about the virtues of tax cuts and private health care. A half-hour passed--and the cable news channels cut away to an incident at the Oakland airport a couple of times--before he came to the main point, the reason they were carrying the speech live: to articulate his latest views on Iraq.

"And the startling thing about these views is that they haven't changed a bit.