Pain in the McCain

Yummy tidbit alert! The New York Times has finally posted the much-anticipated and potentially explosive "Inside the McCain campaign" article that will be in this Sunday's Times Magazine. Oh, it's delicious, folks. A portait of a campaign in a mess, endlessly looking for new "sticky" ways to frame their guy, constantly reacting, never driving events, the disastrous Palin pick and at the center of it all, a cranky codger of a candidate. It's the veritable how-to of how-to lose an election.He quotes a McCain advisor at one point, "This is part of the Schmidt gotta-have-absolute-message-discipline thing. That's one of the disagreements. And John can be really resistant. He's always worried about being put in a box. He's got a very sensitive nerve about it. A lot of times I would hear him say: 'Don't control me. This is my campaign.' But I think Steve has convinced him that we've got to do this if we're going to win." If you love your Schadenfreude hot, don't miss it. It's long but worth a read.

Incidentally, you might notice that Palin's voice coach, Priscilla Shanks makes a guest appearance in the article above. Ben Smith at Politico astutely notes that Shanks is on the list of RNC expenditures too, in the line item for "Operation expenditures" and "Get-out-the-vote consulting." Is this what they call "creative accounting"?

(By the way Robert Draper? No more seat for you on the McCain plane. FYI.)

The Onion, masters of the fake newspaper, branch out to TV news with a hilarious segment on a minor "campaign incident" in which John McCain is inadvertently locked overnight in the Straight Talk Express. If you're looking for an hour of more fun, there quite few Onion political videos on YouTube here. Ah, YouTube, I love you.

And more HIGH-larity and HIGH-jinx. WaPo dutifully reports that a blogger posting on an Al-Qaeda associated website announces that McCain has won the all important Al-Qaeda endorsement. Oh, Snap! Take that Colin Powell!