Le Maverique L'âne

Hee Haw:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was close to leaving the Republican Party in 2001, weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent, according to former Democratic lawmakers who say they were involved in the discussions.

In interviews with The Hill this month, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) said there were nearly two months of talks with the maverick lawmaker following an approach by John Weaver, McCain’s chief political strategist.

Democrats had contacted Jeffords and then-Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) in the early months of 2001 about switching parties, but in McCain’s case, they said, it was McCain’s top strategist who came to them.

Big surprise, McCain's campaign is strenuously denying the accuracy of this report. But why on earth would Daschle and Downey make this shit up, particularly now, when McCain's losing ground faster than the slutty girl in a slasher flick? And, by the way, Weaver doesn't even deny the talk took place; he just accuses Downey of mischaracterizing it: "We certainly didn’t discuss in any detail about the senator’s political plans and any discussion about party-switchers, generically, would have been limited to the idle gossip which was all around the city about the [Democrats'] aggressive approach about getting any GOP senator to switch in order to gain the majority. Nothing more or less than that."

Downey says Weaver's full of shit, and, reading between the lines of the article, it sounds to me like McCain was fishing to find out how hard the Dems were willing to fellate him—"if the right people asked him"; Daschle and McCain "had meetings and conversations on the floor and in his office, I think in mine as well, about how we would do it, what the conditions would be. We talked about committees and his seniority … [A lot of issues] were on the table"—then flirted with the idea of going Independent, and eventually took a pass.

But reading between the lines isn't even necessary—this story reeks of McCain, the horrific, stumbling zombie corpse of a once-credible man, whose ambition has eclipsed any hint of integrity, the merest shred of decency. Hopelessly disingenuous, abidingly opportunistic, and incorrigibly cynical, he would sell out his every last heartfelt conviction, if only he had any in the first place.