But it is okay that McCain cheated on his wife.

McCain commits adultery and that makes him a better candidate? I don't think so.

Isn't it a shame that this Messiah stuff is all they can come up for a well spoken American who just happens to be half white and half black. Cut me a break.

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"I'm crazy about John McCain and I love him to pieces," Carol McCain told the New York Times, "but I'm just not going to do interviews."

I haven't seen anything on that. I see where she helps her own race. I haven't heard anything about her helping children with health problems like Mrs. McC.

If anyone has any proof that Mrs. O does help others, I'd seriously like to know about it.

...tired from being forced to move the SECOND time (due to Bush's ignorance regarding Blair house) to listen to any more BS.

Doesn't mean she has to actually DO anything to earn the bucks. She got a great big raise (nearly triple - and still claimed they had trouble paying off their college loans) when he was elected to the senate. I imagine her primary duty at the hospital was simply to be Mrs. Senator Obama, so naturally no one could possibly replace her.

Whenever I see a photo of MO with that huge toothy grin I am reminded of a Kate Hepburn line as Eleanor in Lion in Winter. She describes one of her husband's former mistresses as having prominent teeth, ''She smiled to excess, but chewed with real distinction.''

It *seems* to her the veteran showed disrespect to the flag, but I doubt she can come up with a concrete alternative way for him to have removed that flag, managed it single-handed, while being able to defend himself.

I think when our embassies have been under attack, the folks who took down those flags were probably in as much of a hurry, and I doubt they did anything differently.

Good analogy, by the way, about the grandfather. First you protect the kid, then you dust him off and see whether he's hurt.

As to stomping on the Mexican flag, no, I would not have. The store owners may have flown the two flags as they did out of ignorance, not to show deliberate disrespect. They may not have bothered to familiarize themselves with the law. They may not even speak English, but have now received a valuable lesson, which I hope someone will explain to them. If they are wise, they will learn from it. If not, they will get together several hundred of their closest friends, petition Obama, march, riot, demand ''equality'' now, and be a general pain in the patootie. I would love to see the followup on this....

like he hurts. It makes me uncomfortable to watch. Obama has a significantly larger amt of data in his mind (constitutional law professor, etc) to sort through, gather, and assemble before he responds to a question. It is to his favor that he does not immediately yelp out an answer like a trained seal.

Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. "I broke my promise to always tell the truth," McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

The precise moment of McCain's abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on "The View," the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig -- an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician's lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

At a forum last week at Columbia University, McCain said, "But right now we have to restore trust and confidence in government." This was always the promise of John McCain, the single best reason to vote for him. America has been cheated on too many times -- the lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq. So many lies. Who believes that in Afghanistan last month, only five civilians were killed by the American military in an airstrike, instead of the approximately 90 claimed by the Afghan government? Not me. I first gave up on the military during Vietnam and then again when it covered up the death of Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger and former NFL player who was killed in 2004 by friendly fire.

McCain was going to fix all that. He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can -- as he did in South Carolina -- renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won't work. Karl Marx got one thing right -- what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

cohenr@washpost.com

Bush systematically deregulating (savings and loans - Keating 5) and wall street so that the souless corporations can do whatever they want without any limits. they have removed the safety factors built into the system after the great depression. Well, now we have the situation that deregulation brings. As Romney said at this years' repub convention - McCain is going to go at all the regulations on industry with a weed wacker.

But it is okay that McCain cheated on his wife.

The Ugly New McCain