John McCain is taking it to Congressman Murtha and the other congressional surrender monkeys:

The Arizona Republican said that people upset by his comments about IEDs to Jon Stewart on Tuesday night’s “Daily Show” should “lighten up.” After being grilled by Stewart , McCain jokingly told him that he had a present for him — an IED that he could place under his desk.

John McCain gets a lot of heat from bloggers — some of it from me, not that I matter individually, but I have also defended him as a good conservative on most core issues who, like every other politician (and every other person), has flaws. The fact that the media has turned on him means he must be doing something very right, which he is, by sticking to his guns, so to speak, on the Iraq surrender question. But a number of other things have changed, not for the benefit of John McCain.

One is that he is coming across as increasingly strange, in terms of things he’ll say — almost Deanesque. The quote above? Well, perhaps you had to be there. I like a good gag as much anyone, maybe more — but that isn’t funny. I don’t mean “it’s in bad taste, stop laughing.” I mean it is not funny. Is it possible that by virtue of losing his chorus among the media, he is just sounding tinnier? Isn’t it rich, losing his timing this late in his career?

The other is that the man is not aging gracefully, and the deformity on one side of his face seems to be more prominent as his youth — a youth largely given over to the service of his country — slips away. I was astonished at how prominent this deformity is in person when I spoke with him at a GOP Senate campaign stop in New Jersey several years ago. Physical imperfection has no bearing on his qualifications at all. Heck, John McCain has been bald as long as we’ve known him, and the track record of bald presidential candidates in modern politics is not good (Stevenson… Humphrey… Ford…), yet no one considered that a deal breaker.  But it can scarcely be pretended that his physical appearance at this point does not affect McCain’s electability, especially in a time of unparalleled superficiality.

In all, John McCain just seems less attractive than ever, notwithstanding his (qualified) virtues. He almost had a moment perhaps — the moment that may have been in some sense (some say a very specific sense) stolen by George Bush. But that moment certainly seems to be in the past.

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid defended calling the war in Iraq ‘lost’ in an interview with CNN‘s Dana Bash Monday.”

Lucy Van Pelt:

Now Charlie Brown has what you call a Failure Face, Linus. Notice how it has failure written all over it. Study it carefully. You rarely see such a good example.

Hillary Clinton can’t stand cronyism:

She denounced the Bush administration, which she said has left the government incompetent. “They have shown contempt for our government,” Clinton said. “We’ve got to get back to having qualified people, not cronies, serving in the government of the United States.”

That must be why “if she is elected president, she would make her husband a roaming ambassador to the world, using his skills to repair the nation’s tattered image abroad”:

“I can’t think of a better cheerleader for America than Bill Clinton, can you?” the Democratic senator from New York asked a crowd jammed into a junior high school gymnasium. “He has said he would do anything I asked him to do. I would put him to work.”

All right, that’s a little bit of a cheap shot.  It isn’t exactly cronyism when the crony used to be President.  I actually believe cronyism is this Administration’s signal weakness, and that most other of its weaknesses flow from it.  But coming from a Clinton, it is hard to stomach.  Here’s what one writer, doing a little of the homework for me, wrote a couple of years ago:

While we’re on the subject, let us not forget that the Bush Administration did not invent cronyism. Hillary Clinton in charge of Heath Care … Or what about Harry and Linda Thomason and Web Hubbell?

Those were bad.  The Bush Administration may be worse.  But is it so much worse that Hillary Clinton wants to raise this issue in a campaign where George Bush will not even be running?

It’s gun control, and he’s going to have a harder time crawling out of that problem than abortion, divorce or his (old) comb-over (I am a theoretical* Giuliani supporter, by the way):

With bloggers in the lead, Dems have gotten past the gun-control issue and helped reclaim majorities with help from netroots backed pro-gun candidates . . . . As Rudy Giuliani faces heat from social conservatives for telling them they need to “get beyond issues” like abortion, one wonders how many elections the GOP has to lose before they embrace a similar evolution.

I had not thought of this angle. Like all New York City politicians, Rudy is a gun control absolutist. It’s the religion of municipal government here and, regardless of what his state of nature views might have once been — as on homosexual rights, abortion and other social issues — by the time he was a mayoral candidate, Rudy was a true believer.

Very interesting. Hat tip to Insty.

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*I say theoretical because I keep trying to volunteer but my emails go off into cyber-nowhere-land. His campaign is interested in my money only. But I have no money. I do have other things, I think. But I guess they’re things Rudy doesn’t need…

“I was briefed” — the “my dog ate my homework” for politicians.