McCain

Our friend Mike has an interesting post up about McCain's bad luck with flying machines. But tristero has a post entitled "It's His Judgment, Stupid" that might really get to the crux of the Icky Vicky matter. In the same vein, here's NYT editor Bill Keller on NPR (emphasis mine):

Keller says the relevance of McCain's relationship to Iseman stems from his political identity as someone who wages war against monied powerbrokers seeking to exert influence on Capitol Hill.

"He came back from Vietnam a hero, entered into public life and then was felled by the Keating Five scandal," Keller says. "If you read his books, it was clearly a humiliating event for him. And he subsequently built his political life on themes of redemption, reform, you know, rectitude, if you will — and became the scourge of lobbyists, the champion of campaign finance reform, and so on, in Washington."

"Yet, according to some people who knew him best, he can be surprisingly careless about his reputation," Keller says. "And that's what I think this, his relationship with this particular lobbyist, illustrates, although I think there's a lot of other illustrations as well in the piece."

And I think "carelessness" is a quality we don't need any more of in the White House.