First off, John McCain is still pretty funny.  I'm going out on a limb here again and I'm going to say something nice about the man.  John McCain actually has a sense of humor and is able to deliver a joke pretty well for a politician.  He is capable of demonstrating an honest and irrascible sense of glee.  I like that.  It's at moments like the one where he joked that his social security number is "eight" that I remember why it is that I still like John McCain the man.

The driven, particular, mean old cuss with an openness and willingness to connect with the young and with the press is still in there.  Watch him in a crowd of college students.  I defy you to find another modern Republican who's able to connect with them in the way that John McCain does.  He really does have the knack.  Oh, Barack Obama's an absolutely stratospheric rockstar in that millieu and outclasses McCain brilliantly, but just the same, John McCain can talk to the young pretty well for an old guy.

This is the same John McCain that, up until recently, would jawbone with the press for hours.  He'd answer damned near any question anybody would ask.  The man seemed preternaturally incapable of staying on message, but that was such an integral part of his charm.

That's what makes the rest of this so sad.  John McCain pivoted, last night on Leno, from being genuine, respectful, and funny (and he really was each of those things) to using his time in Hanoi as a political crutch again!  He's been doing it for years, but it is absolutely getting out of hand.

Senator McCain has been trading the better angels of his nature for hyperbolic attack ads, a cheapening of his own service, and a willingness to flirt with questioning his opponent's patriotism.  The John McCain of today simply isn't the man we used to know.  Does that mean we were deluding ourselves in 2000?  No, or at least not very much.  It means that John McCain has made a choice:

John McCain wants to win.  While there are probably some things he isn't willing to say or do, I'm quite unable to imagine what they would be.  John McCain has sold out, and sold out hard.  While at times like last night I can still be positive about the man, it's always fleeting because he invariably does something to enrage me or depress me.  It's then that I better understand what it was I was feeling:

Nostalgia.

A remembrance of John McCain's better days.  The worst thing that could have possibly happened to him was winning his party's nomination.  Seriously, I actually feel bad for the man.  He's probably going to lose, and in the process he will have destroyed his legacy.  The young will no longer feel a kinship and respect for the man.  The conservative base does not love him, they are living with him as their nominee.  He will be a man without a base, without a core, without a political anchor.

We have to wreck him, politically.  John McCain, the candidate, is going to get clobbered hard because he has made that necessary.  He's doing the only thing he can conceivably do to win, but it's just so cheap and such a waste of the man.  I don't enjoy any of this, but he has to lose.

Run the contrast ads.  Bury him with his own words.  Do what must be done.  But, please, shed a tear for the man.  Nothing we do to him now can compare with what he's done to himself, and it's sad.