So, it’s been a bit problematic of late that the McCain Campaign has had to shed a number of compromised campaign officials when the soiled workclothes from the many dirty jobs on their lengthy resumes–defending the interests of Myanmar, erstwhile Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zairean kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan terrorist leader Jonas Savimbi, Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida, the Iraqi National Congress (remember Wolfowitz’s and Cheney’s hero, Ahmed Chalabi, who was waiting with his U-Haul in March 2003 when we opened both barrels on Iraq–and with whom the United States military just this month cut its ties over Chalabi’s recent contacts with our new WFF, Iran) and many others–have threatened the sully the virgin whites of McCain’s pristine reformer campaign.

One of these who hasn’t gone of his own volition, and is in fact more prominent in the campaign than ever, senior adviser Charles Black. Charlie Black is the head of BKSH Associates. Black cut his teeth in the firm of Black, Manafort, and Stone. Before Black, Manafort, and Stone, it was considered poor form to represent both politicians and political interests. In a challenged and overextended economic environment, though, it’s just bad sport on the part of the government to keep its boot on the market’s neck and constrict opportunity like this. Black, Manafort, and Stone were visionary enough to see this for what it was.

Thomsas Edsall quoted Black in today’s Huffington Post, “I think there is a great advantage in dealing with people who you personally know and trust . . . most importantly, can they [elected officials] trust you [the lobbyist] to tell the truth . . . there is an advantage to the client and to the person in position of authority to deal with someone they know and trust,” Black said.

MotherJones Blog released a list of 220 clients BKSH has represented since 1998–Bristol-Myers Squibb, Glaxo SmithKline, ChevronTexaco, Occidental Petroleum, Johnson & Johnson, Pharmanex, Tobacco Quote Warehouse Alliance, Yukos Oil–for a total of $57 million and change. To assume that would buy any influence in Washington would be presumptuous, even cynical in the eye of a darker soul. And just considering the client examples above, I think the level of good-feeling about the pharmaceutical, petroleum, and tobacco industries by the American consumer is its own validation of the effectiveness of Black’s lobbyist-politician Weltanschung.

The sticking point here is that John McCain has made the latter point of his career professing himself to be free of influence-peddling and quid pro quo representation. At a town hall meeting in New    Hampshire last November, McCain said, “Everybody says that they’re against the special interests. I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to.”

And if we parse that liberally, that might be true: They don’t need to throw their money there, because their hired guns already have corner offices in Straight Talk, Inc.

This is the kind of inside baseball that makes a lot of eyes glaze over out on the hustings, but it shouldn’t, and it probably won’t come the fall. Black is dismissive of what he sees as a tempest in a teapot. “This is complete inside-the-Beltway nonsense,” Black said. “I do not believe that average voters out there care.”

Well, not so fast. If you’re worried about your health care and having to spend more and more every week to fill up your gas tank, and you have your vote to give to a campaign,  are you going to give it to the candidate who promises to fix the problem, or the candidate who promises to fix the problem and has paid representatives of the pharmaceutical and petroleum companies running their campaign? The first candidate may still betray your faith–’tis the nature of politics, after all–but the second candidate already has.

Until recently, there’s been an enormous disconnect and arrogance at play in the McCain campaign that they really feel like no one is going to connect the dots in a way that the voters who drip gravy onto their wife-beaters can understand. He’s been lucky to have the Barack-and-Hillary donnybrook capturing everyone’s attention, but as Hillary dangles on the ropes and Obama offers a passing jab or two to keep her there as the clock on the 15th round winds down on the undercard, a few curious eyeballs have gone ahead in the program and started really looking at the heavyweight coming out on the main card.

McCain received $112,000 in contributions from Keating, but it was determined in a 1989 investigation by the Arizona Republic that the junior Senator from the Grand Canyon State had a more complicated involvement with Keating, in that McCain’s wife and father had invested $359,100 in 1986 in a Keating shopping center, and that the McCains had accepted trips to the Bahamas on Keating’s plane. As the Arizona Republic reported on their attempts to interview McCain about his heretofore undisclosed dealings with Keating found the Senator a wee bit prickly and exhibiting an attitude many would consider far short of cooperative.

When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself.

“You’re a liar,” McCain said when a Republic reporter asked him about the business relationship between his wife and Keating.

“That’s the spouse’s involvement, you idiot,” McCain said later in the same conversation. “You do understand English, don’t you?”

That’s a whole lot of surly and a far cry from the man about whom MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said, “The press loves McCain. We’re his base.” That micturition moment was where McCain learned his lesson about how to deal with the media, and, from that point forward, embarked on a campaign to ingratiate himself with the press that continues to this day. He learned that you can catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar and this strategy has proved a fairly smashing success. A McCain interview is embarrassingly close to a Tom Jones concert, with the press practically throwing their panties onstage when The Candidate steps up to speak.

On the night of George Bush’s 2008 State Of The Union Address, Matthews welcomed McCain on Hardball with a gushing, “There he is! Senator McCain! You know you’re in my heart. I have to tell you, the President gave your speech tonight. He talked about we got to cut the number of earmarks in half or I’m going to veto the bill, he talked about..about the war against terrorism, he talked about reform. It was…he didn’t talk about much about the global economic challenge right now. In fact, he said basically we’ll get through this like you do. It was your speech, Senator.” Good lord. I’d rather hear about Barack Obama making his leg tingle. (And I don’t understand the impetus beyond the trend I’m seeing in Chris Matthews’ non-sexual man-love declarations, but I suppose that’s a discussion for another day.)

But that brings us to where we are today, and why McCain had, has, and continues to get a relative free ride from the media. And that’s why he’s able to claim on his website, “Too often the special interest lobbyists with the fattest wallets and best access carry the day when issues of public policy are being decided,” while in the same breath his campaign staff is absolutely stinking with lobbyists, and that you can’t pick up the paper or turn on the radio without hearing of another lobbyist leave the McCain campaign under pressure seemingly with the same frequency that Barack Obama is acquiring superdelegates.

In the past several weeks, McCain has shed no less than five prominent lobbyists from major roles in his campaign, and McCain–the man who professed to have come into this campaign as clean as a hound’s tooth–has had to impose a new conflict-of-interest policy on his campaign. Tom Loeffler left the campaign after it was disclosed that his lobbying firm had accepted nearly $15 million from the Saudi Arabia government. He claimed that at no time had he ever discussed John McCain with the Saudi government, but he didn’t mention the May 17, 2006 meeting between Loeffler, Senator McCain, and the Saudi ambassador.

According to The Trail blog on washingtonpost.com, McCain previously lost two Dougs in his fight–in Doug Davenport and Doug Goodyear–who left after acknowedging their contracting for the government of Burma. He also lost Eric Burgeson, who was McCain’s energy-policy adviser and also is lead energy practice adviser at Barbour Griffith & Rogers LLC.

Also last seen taking his box of personal effects out to his car was Craig Shirley of Shirley & Bannister Public Affairs–which bills itself as “the nation’s oldest conservative lobbying organization.” Craig has helped bring to the American political conversation such high-water marks as the 1988 Willie Horton ad.

They may have some of the foals left, but it’s the big pony who’s important, and Charlie Black is still in the stable. But more on this tomorrow night….

McCain had an amusing bit on Saturday Night Live last week where he played up the ageist issue that is simmering in the campaign, as he is trying to become the oldest man ever elected to a first term as President of the United States. It was funny and sought to defuse some of the concerns that McCain is too old and angry to be President, but like a long-in-the-tooth heavyweight who surprised the naysayers by landing a few old-school left hooks in his first round in the ring with a much younger and more-energetic competitor, McCain found some new oats today at an airport in Stockton, California, and upped the ante, disparaging Barack Obama repeatedly as “young man” and noting, with repeated emphasis, Obama’s “very, very great lack of experience.”

According to Michael Luo in his New York Times blog, “‘I admire and respect Senator Obama,’ Mr. McCain said, his voice full of sarcasm. ‘For a young man with very little experience, he’s done very well.’”

I didn’t see the footage, so without context, I expected at first glance this was something akin to Ronald Reagan’s addressing the age question in the second 1984 Presidential debate with Walter Mondale as pledging, “I will not exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

But this is John McCain, and in his advancing years and with the pressure of this campaign, and with his storied history of prickly and often incendiary outbursts, it seems like–his SNL and Letterman appearances notwithstanding–McCain’s earnestly crafted, jocular, good-guy mien might be showing some strain already. His comments in Stockton emerged in the context of a nasty micturition match between the Arizona Senator and his perceived teenaged opponent for whom he has so much increasing disdain. The volley between them went with a blinding and venomous rapidity today, over a huge bullseye that Senator McCain painted on his back…

GI BILK: From war hero to war zero. While McCain was busy in California deriding his presumptive opponent’s youth and experience, his colleagues in the United States Congress were busy doing the business of righting the wrongs of the Bush Administration treating with more indifference than they treat their trash collectors the men and women who have been fighting their wars, and coming home to little more than a handsome lump of coal and the promise that they’ll get the blink of an eye with their loved ones before they’re heading back into harm’s way–and God help them if they get hurt and have to be shipped back to an underfunded military hospital.

After passing the House last week by 90 votes, the 21st Century GI Bill of Rights cleared the Senate today by a whopping 75 to 22 votes. The bill was introduced by Virginia Senator Jim Webb shortly after his narrow and surprising win over Senator George Allen a year and a half ago. Webb is a decorated Vietnam vet and a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and had changed his party affiliation to Democrat shortly before the 2006 election.

Webb was a maverick for much of his professional and military career. He resigned as Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy in 1988 rather than accede in orders to reduce the size of the naval fleet, which he wanted to increase to 600 ships. In 1994, he endorsed Democrat Chuck Robb in his Senate campaign against Webb’s fellow Marine Oliver North, but in 2000, he endorsed George Allen over Robb.

With the Iraq War, Webb started to initiate a substantive break with the Republican Party that he’d served. In the lead-up to the 2004 Presidential Election, with the war in Iraq a year old, Webb wrote in USA Today, “Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target.”

It was that impassioned anti-war zeal that gave birth to petition drives urging Webb to challenge George Allen for the Senate in 2006, and in tribute to his son, Jimmy, who was serving in Iraq, wore his son’s combat boots every day of the 2006 campaign.

After shocking Allen in November 2006 and his inauguration in January 2007, Webb hit the ground running using his new position in a new Democratic majority not only to opposing the war but to seeking some tribute for the veterans who were being so woefully ignored and seeing their hospital and benefit funding slashed under George Bush.

The original GI Bill, implemented after World War II, was not only a huge and just reward for the Veterans who gave the prime years of their lives and were lucky enough not to have their entrails spread all over Europe and the Pacific, but was a huge boon for the American economy, ultimately resulting in $7 in the U.S. economy for every $1 we put into the GI Bill. It offered low- or no-interest home loans and full-ride schooling, among other benefits. It’s been peeled like a carrot since the 1970s.

Since we deployed our troops to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration hasn’t increased benefits as a reward for our men and women who are going to the mats at Bush’s behest after 9/11, but has instead continued to eviscerate the military’s already meager educational benefits, and slashing funding for medical benefits and Walter Reed Hospital. This is like asking a neighbor to donate his compatible blood for your sick wife and swiping his wallet while the needle’s in.

No one should understand the sacrifice of military service and the betrayal of the Bush Administration better that John McCain–who gave five years of his own life being tortured by the Vietnamese. But there were three conspicuous absences in Washington, D.C. today when the 21st Century GI Bill of Rights came up for a Senate vote. One of those absences was, sadly, Ted Kennedy. Another was an unexplained absence by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn. The third? Our erstwhile military hero, Senator John McCain.

Senator Obama prefaced his remarks about Senator McCain’s absence with a respectful nod to his service, but questioned rightfully why John McCain went the most self-serving and flaccid route in addressing this bill by neither voting for nor voting against it, and attending a California fund-raiser instead.

McCain has come out against Webb’s GI Bill, saying it’s too costly and would jeopardize re-enlistment, because the educational benefits would be too tantalizing to keep the troops in the military.

That was a sound argument for plantation owners not offering weekend passes to their slaves, but even to give John McCain and his tiny minority the benefit of the doubt, what does a no vote on the GI Bill do for initial enlistments, besides encouraging the lowering of standards and the continued enlistment of felons and morons in order to keep a viable military? I’m just curious.

It wasn’t Al Gore, but dragging John Edwards off the fence while Hillary basked in the firefly glow of her landslide victory in West Virginia was no small notch in the Obama belt today. Obama picked up 2.5 superdelegates today in addition to how many of Edwards’ 19 delegates who were freed up today by the Edwards endorsement. Depending upon their movement in the next few days, Hillary could easily end the week with a net loss of delegates in spite of her walloping of Obama in a state where even the flies are white and they’re barely an offramp to an arterial to a plank road removed from the Information Superhighway, though one of their connected bretheren surely shared the oral history version of the “Obama is a Muslim” email with them.

Hillary had a meeting at her home today to woo donors and superdelegates, and left no group uncourted, quietly encouraging pledged delegates that there would be a seat the Hillary dinner table if they didn’t like the accomodations at Chez Barack. He’s got the spiciest dish and the kind of hospitality they haven’t had before, but Hillary thinks she’s got the meat, potatoes, and gravy that will be more palatable to all comers, and that she can promise a lot more dinners for the next four years, no matter how many lies and distortions she has perpetuated in her mission to prove herself the hostess with the mostess.

To no one’s surprise, she was defiant in every venue today. She’s in it to win it, and she’s not going to give up the nomination until the delegates pry it from her cold, dead hands. She’s lost in states won, lost in pledged delegates, and Obama has surpassed her once-mighty lead in superdelegates and she’s getting tinier in his rearview. She stands a chance of beating him in the popular vote with the inclusion of Florida and Michigan, and Puerto Rico–which can’t vote in the general election–but

And to no one’s surprise, the avalanche in the Mountain State was arrested then and there. There was some hope that this might end today with her meeting with he r sugar daddies and mamas. No time like the present to bow out on a huge winning note on a shout-out to the party that, “I know you love me, but I’m big enough to concede that you love my opponent and colleague from Illinois just a little more.” Well, we could have hoped.

The John Edwards endorsement of Barack Obama is another line in the Clinton Presidential eulogy that so many are hoping for but it seems clearer isn’t forthcoming. No matter. She’s dying whether she is going to admit it or not. Hillary is not going to come to a tipping point herself. It’s going to be the superdelegates and the other Democratic powerhouses who are going to have to force the issue. Edwards’ 19 delegates might not dutifully go to Barack just on their man’s say-so, but the math and the movement of the delegates are going to continue to lament the late Hillary and how we once knew her, before she became a slave to the rotten advice of Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson and the delusional enthusiasm of the rabidly loyal Terry McAuliffe and James Carville.

She’ll get her victory in Kentucky, and one more in Puerto Rico, but the superdelegate green room is going to keep getting emptier and emptier, and a Gillooly-Eckhardt-Stant-like kneecapping in Tonya Harding Country on Tuesday is going to remind her that she’s losing and the superdelegate momentum pledged to Obama long ago. Unfortunately it won’t be enough to sober her into leaving the race, thus denying me the opportunity to entitle Wednesday morning’s blog, “Oregone!” Oh well. I’ll find some way to use it in 2012 hopefully.

So there she’ll be still standing. If anyone doubts how desperate and serious she is, simply compare all of her pre-February speeches when she spoke of 2,025 delegates for the nomination. Now it’s 2,209, which includes the Florida and Michigan delegates. It’s starting to get a little spooky that her ambition is so naked that she might dip her foot in the water for an independent bid this wall. Hilleiberman ’08? God help us, everyone, but she’s in a full-blown hostage situation right now, and this awful end game could very well happen.

On the other hand…

BOB-BARR-DIER: No joy in the McCain campaign this week as erstwhile GOP bomb-thrower, former Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, announced his bid for the Libertarian nomination for President Of The United States.

I don’t think that Barack needs this, because once the media focus turns to a one-on-one, even the reporters who have been smitten by John McCain and his barbecue invitations are going to buckle under the pressure to start treating him with the bare-knuckles that he deserves. But an insurgent conservative can’t help but shake up the mix.

Huckabee was the lovable underdog and everyone’s favorite story in the GOP race, as long as he was nabbing second-place finishes and causing an untold-number of Mitt Romney tantrums behind closed doors as he continued to pile up the Christian and conservative votes that Romney was supposed to get. Of course, no one loved that more than John McCain, watching as Mitt Romney threw tens of millions of dollars at the evangelicals and Southern conservatives, only to have Mike Huckabee walk in like a little boy trying to buy candy at the corner store, pulling a handful of change out of his pocket, flashing his doe-eyes to the grocer and holding his hand out, “I’ve got this much, mister. Is it enough?”, and skipping on his way with a pocketful of chocolate bars.

Yes, it was all very cute–then. It was a little less cute when Huckabee won five states on Super Tuesday, but that was still okay because it took out another few tires on Romney’s battered and heavily-depleted armored van, which he finally packed up and drove back to Massachusetts on Thursday. McCain didn’t need Huckabee to run interference on his right flank anymore. Thanks for your help, Mike. You’re on the short-list for Veep, and if nothing else I’ll toss you a Cabinet post. If you want to send any of your staff my way, feel free, and you can have a couple of my people to help close your offices if you want. So….good luck, you ran a heckuva campaign, and don’t be a stranger!

Not so fast. Then came this past weekend and Huckabee victories in Kansas, Louisiana, and a tight race in Washington that the once unfailingly-amiable Huckabee threatened to lawyer up for. Keith Olbermann noted last night that, to many in the party, “Mike Huckabee isn’t as funny as he was a week ago.”

Meh. Sure, McCain would like to get on with it. But Huckabee didn’t think he was even going to be invited to this party, and he’s having the time of his life. He doesn’t want to leave yet–but that doesn’t mean he’s going to still be there in the morning. Give him another drink, let him look through your DVDs and play with the cat, and be politely unengaging with him as you go about cleaning up the house, and he’ll eventually get the message and leave.

Truth be told, though, your muscles atrophy if you don’t use them, especially at John McCain’s age. He isn’t going to have a confirmed opponent for months, and a sparring partner or two would do him good. Mike Huckabee is getting a few unexpected punches in, but there’s no way he’s going to knock out the new champ (no matter how tepidly he’s been anointed).

Meanwhile, no one’s noticed poor Ron Paul in all of this, even as he polled 21% in the Washington caucuses this past Saturday. His faithful are still lining up on the freeway overpasses with their “Google Ron Paul!” banners, but the surly, bomb-throwing former optometrist is still there, but fizzling like a wet fuse.

If there’s any doubt that Huck’s journey might really done, one need only look to the unfortunate portent that one of the campaign’s press vans ran out of gas this morning and another had a flat tire.

The only terror Romney was quelling with the suspension of his campaign was that of Ann Romney sitting at their kitchen table over a calculator and a stack of bank and IRA statements figuring how many more fruitless primary states would have to hand her husband the bronze medal before she had to take a cashier job at Sam’s Club.

On the way out, Romney expressed gratitude to his many far-right adherents who comprised the most unlikely political bloc since the six Jews and four African-Americans who voted for David Duke in 1992.

For the most part, the party faithful took the loss of their serial reinventionist hero stoically. American viewers of MSNBC’s “The Dan Abrams Show” were treated tonight to on-the-air gun-toting conservative radio host and Portland, Oregon’s favorite son (using, of course, the same dubious criteria that would make Tonya Harding our favorite daughter), Lars Larson, who was on hand to defend whatever enduring influence of talk radio might remain after Republican voters rebuffed an almost-rabid campaign by Messrs. and Ms’s Larson, Limbaugh, Coulter, Ingraham, O’Reilly, et. al., to cast their votes for Romney.

Fellow guests, progressive radio host Rachel Madow and The New Republic‘s David Beinhart, did everything but roll their eyes and make masturbation gestures as Larson insisted that he held no ill will against his listeners who chose not to vote for Romney and that his job as a radio talk show host was merely to give his listeners information and let them come to their own conclusions. For the last several weeks, as a McCain anointment became increasingly a fait accompli, that “information” basically boiled down to the contention that John McCain has put a bullet hole in the soul of America, and if you elect him President, he’ll stick his penis in the exit wound–and nominate Cindy Sheehan to the Supreme Court.

I guess I’ve missed his column on DailyKos or his guns-for-abortion-vouchers exchange program, but I never got the memo that red-blooded, Red State war hero John McCain had turned yellow and pinko. I thought the GOP tethered their own better than that. The last mainstream Republican I remember straying so far off the reservation and coming out in favor of abortion and gays in the military was Ted Kennedy’s opponent in his 1994 Senate race. His name escapes me now, but…oh, I remember: Mitt Romney.

Lest anyone get the impression that Romney is a dreaded flip-flopper like his fellow Bay Staters John Kerry and Michael Dukakis, Joe Scarborough disabused that notion with a unique defense of Romney’s evolving positions: The last time he flipped, he flopped on the Right side. Republican Roulette, in other words.

As for his future plans, Romney was already turned away at Democratic National Committee headquarters Thursday morning in his bid to toss his hat in the ring for the potentially-stalemated Democratic nomination, with the Democrats citing, among other things, byzantine nominating rules that prevent a vanquished Republican candidate from trying to buy his way into the race with his pledged Republican delegates.

Coming off his big caucus win there Tuesday, Romney also submitted an offer in tender to purchase North Dakota and the U.S. Senate seat of Kent Conrad. State officials, who conceded they could use the money, said they were consulting with their attorneys and the United States Government to explore the legality and feasibility of such an offer.

MEAN HO’ DEAN: In other news, DNC Chairman Howard Dean attempted to flex his muscle in a way he hasn’t since he screamed his way to a third-place finish in Iowa in 2004. With the spectre of a brokered Clinton-Obama convention looming, he promised that before the delegates and candidates land in Denver in August, he’ll bring both sides together and “knock some heads” and get one side or the another to bow out and pledge their support for the other. Governor Dean has had delusions of grandeur before, so he might be forgiven for thinking for a moment that he was Terry McAuliffe, but if he really is able to ever convene such a meeting, the only head likely to get knocked is his own.

Rush Limbaugh has been the lemming Pied Piper for the GOP ever since it became clear that Mitt Romney’s suit was as empty as some of the few states that he’s carried so far. In the last week he’s twice referenced “anal poisoning” in disparaging one Republican solon’s close relationship with the Senator. Both Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter have chimed in in the last week, saying they’d sooner vote for Hillary than pull the lever for “traitor” John McCain (which is an interesting and not-at-all accidental epithet to hurl at a man who sacrificed five years of his life and endured torture with a frequency greater than most of us do staff meetings before he’d tell the Viet Cong who invented the telephone).

There has been early anecdotal evidence of sparsely-attended Republican primary polling places being understandably mistaken for Sandy Duncan book signings, but Time magazine yesterday did a devastating state-by-state study on primary voter turnout between the parties, and determined that the Democrats have outpolled the Republicans by a whopping 73% so far this election season.

This is a curious protest among the Republican faithful. After all. there’s no evidence thus far to suggest that McCain’s substantial numbers are solely the result of bused-in Massachusetts saboteurs all working on Barney Frank’s payroll. These have been actual Republicans who have given McCain the delegates he’s gained so far.

Even after the Senator George Allen “Macaca” incident and other embarrassments of the 2006 campaign, the GOP still had a reasonably-untainted New Age paleoconservative in Kansas Senator Brownback, yet before a single vote was cast the party sent him packing like he was the second coming of Nelson Rockefeller.

Rush Limbaugh has been screaming for weeks that the Republicans will be fouling their house if they anoint John McCain as the party standard-bearer. Yet, despite his listening audience being, according to Mary Matalin, more sizable than the entire roll of voters to cast their primary or caucus ballot leading up to Super Tuesday, he still couldn’t exhort his faithful to win for Mitt Romney a state that wasn’t minuscule or Mormon.

This is all great news for the Democrats as they’re mounting what’s been, after their week or two of tossing their excrement at one another, an increasingly civil if protracted race for the finish. The Republicans, meanwhile, are unshaven and disheveled in their basement, pivoting between tears and rage, as they douse their entire home from the ground up with gasoline, until they drop a lit match and burn it all to the ground just because they can’t abide their rage at the fact that they paid their housepainter to paint the entire house purple, and he did.

Romney has poured a considerable amount of his personal fortune into what is increasingly regarded among the punditocracy as a quixotic quest to nab the GOP nomination. Romney’s sons, Tagg, Matt, Josh, Ben, and Craig, were unabashed in their support for Senator McCain and hoped this would send a clear message to their father to offer a long-overdue concession and withdraw from the race, and save what little is left of their inheritance.

“For the love of Christ, Dad, stop the insanity”, said Romney’s eldest son, Tagg. “The five of us have 13 mortgages and 11 boat payments between us. You’ve had no problem accepting Jen’s and my hospitality at our house in Aspen every year. If you really want to visit us at a time share next winter, make another goddamned ad buy in Pennsylvania, and watch McCain clean your clock there, too.”

“You really want Ben to take a fucking job as a mid-level Wal-Mart Vice President and send your grandchildren to University of Delaware just so you can stroke your own ego like it’s your teenage dick?”

The Romney sons refused to take questions from reporters, as Tagg Romney had the last word in the press conference. “We’re voting for McCain. Period. If you still don’t think we’re serious, pay for another town hall meeting in Ohio, and try and savor that memory of the last time your grandkids came to visit, because the next time you see them will be looking down from heaven when we’re all shoveling dirt on your casket.”

Governor Romney could not be reached for comment.

Instead, the man leading the GOP into the 2008 campaign, is a balding 71-year-old with stark-as-snow whitewalls which had already turned blindingly achromatic on his return from Viet Cong captivity some 35 years ago, and has been falling out strand by strand ever since.

The Romney Campaign suffered a devastating blow to the solar plexus last night in Florida. With Ginormous John Holmes-Sized Tuesday coming up next week and most of the polls in those pivotal states skewing towards John McCain–especially when Rudy drops out today and endorses his buddy, McCain, and Huckabee continues his slavish coveting of the Vice Presidential slot by staying in the race and preventing Mitt from gaining any votes in his absence–Mitt Romney needed to make a statement by coming out of the Sunshine State with a victory.

Not bloody likely. It’s a full-on “Fuck Mitt” strategy right now among the GOP survivors. Never mind Pat Buchanan, who’s been consistently wrong in his primary prognostications (and not surprising, as brother of Romney’s campaign chair Bay Buchanan), who Tuesday night predicted a surge for Romney which went south right along with Romney’s Florida deficit.

But Buchanan’s grousing isn’t surprising, regardless of his sister’s connection to the Romney campaign. It’s the party faithful who still aren’t entirely on board with the idea of a McCain candidacy. He’s old (they all remember Dole ’96, who was falling off stages and would soon be shilling for erectile dysfunction meds, running against vital, far-too-virile Bill Clinton), he’s too cozy with the USA Welcome Mat/here’s-40-acres-and-a-pickup pro-immigration crowd, and his Jesus bonafides are as suspect as those of any Godless Democrat.

Their dread is rather surprising. McCain’s ascent isn’t great news for Democrats, especially if the tenuous trend towards Hillary as the nominee continues. Polls show every Democrat beating Mitt Romney like a pinata. Obama still beats McCain handily, but only a Hillary-McCain matchup bodes ill for the Dems, with most numbers showing a dead heat between the two, given the margin of error.

But November is a long way away, and Lord have mercy on any pol or pundit who dares underestimate the Clinton guile and wile.

Case in point: The Florida Pledge. Hillary didn’t get to be a Clinton just by silently acquiescing to a lifetime of finding Bill on top of strange women in the backseat of the family sedan. As mentioned earlier in this blog, the Democratic Party has attempted to continue its tradition of shooting itself in its electoral feet by penalizing Florida and Michigan and refusing both states’ right to allocate delegates as punishment for moving their primaries up in the season’s calendar. In protest, several Democrats agreed not to campaign in Florida, including Hillary. Still, Hillary continued to do non-campaign campaigning for Florida and was rewarded by winning the state with 50% to Obama’s 33%.

What made this Clinton Smart (and Clinton Sleazy)? Well, come the Democratic Convention in Denver in August, one of the first votes the delegates will take is whether or not to seat the excommunicated Florida and Michigan delegations, and chances are pretty damned good that they will. The Democratic delegates in Florida and Michigan who weren’t counted aren’t going to be pledged to the state’s winner, but…forced to choose, they might well be disposed to cast their vote to whatever candidate cared the most about their state, even when their delegates were in the party dog house. Hillary was on MSNBC last night simultaneously congratulating herself on honoring the Democratic pledge not to campaign in Florida and celebrating her Florida victory.

If it’s a close delegate count for the nomination, this could be Barack Obama’s undoing. On the other hand, it might not be a close delegate count, depending upon what happens this morning, as John Edwards has just announced an appearance in New Orleans and what might be the end of his campaign–and a probable endorsement of Obama (“Probable”? I’m being far too cautious. After the bile that’s been spat between the Edwards and Clinton camps, John Edwards would sooner urge his delegates and supporters to line up for Tonya Harding than he would Hillary Clinton).

Tuesday night, there will be no victory parties for Rudy. He’ll die in Florida like Hyman Roth, in a death as protracted and inevitable. His one-note candidacy didn’t help him (Joe Biden noted that Rudy’s sentences consist of “A noun, a verb, and 9/11″, and the entire Western world cringed at news of a California Giuliani fundraiser where donors were encouraged to pony up “$9.11 for Rudy”). It was far worse than that, though. America’s Mayor was undone by a foolish campaign strategy and enough baggage to keep all of Miami International’s handlers busy for months. His former police chief is under indictment, his children hate him, he hates his children, he squired his mistress on the public dime and even had his NYPD escorts walk her dog, and New Yorkers by the hundreds queued up to remind the country what Rudy’s New York City was really like before he became the deity of 9/11. He was counting on his New York connections to the state’s many transplanted retirees, but along the way has lost the endorsement of the NYPD and he’s seeing his hero status aggressively debunked by the International Association of Firefighters (who’ve trotted out a five-foot rat named “Rudy the Rodent”).

The real suspense now will be watching to see if the notoriously-vindictive Mayor embraces his recent and thorough immolation and tries to pull those who’ve crossed him into his blaze-to-the-ground. A recent article in The New York Times painted a most-unflattering portrait of a man who lives and breathes a scorched-earth policy against anyone who dares to cross him.

The lead of the article centered around a “rough-hewn chaffeur” from the Bronx who called Giuliani’s radio show in 1997 to complain about a police red-light sting. Essentially dismissed by Giuliani, the chauffeur, James Schillaci, went to The Daily News, which ran its own front-page photo and story on the sting the next morning.

Schillaci didn’t have long to revel in the fruits of his civic kvetching, though, as police arrived at his home that morning to arrest him on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. Never mind that the charges were soon tossed out by a judge, a police spokesman read Schillaci’s aged criminal record to a reporter from The Daily News, including a false assertion that he had been convicted of sodomy.

One former Giuliani insider talks of those guilty of transgressions mostly small as being “marked for destruction” by the Mayor.

Casual observers of national news might recall the case of Patrick Dorismond, a security guard and father of two who was killed in a misunderstanding with two undercover New York Narcotics Detectives in 2000. When accounts of Dorismond’s death suggested that the detectives may have been being unduly belligerent during the encounter, Giuliani responded by releasing the dead man’s juvenile records (a clear violation of state law) and suggesting that “he was no altar boy” (which, actually, he was, having gone to the same Catholic Church as the Mayor).

All told, the city paid nearly $7 million during Giuliani’s two terms to settle lawsuits brought against the city for the mayor’s vendettas.

When criticized by former Mayors David Dinkins and Ed Koch, Giuliani ordered both of their official portraits removed from City Hall.

Without an official position, though, nor enough money to pay for plane fare home for anyone on his staff, Giuliani might have to resort to the somewhat cruder methods of his youth for setting his scores (unless he depleted his campaign coffers in anticipation of having to fund his revenge, which given the Mayor’s severing-nose-to-spite-face nature would not surprise).

It can’t be a pretty picture on the Giuliani plane (or bus) this week, with his close advisers who at this point have to be as hollow-eyed, skittish, and submissive as a long-abused spouse after weeks of bearing witness to the campaign’s ugly unraveling and a boss who has long since past his boiling point and is looking for his pound of flesh. With his campaign in ruins and any further discussions of strategy useless, one can only imagine Rudy holed up with his brain trust today wondering how they can scare up enough wharf rats to nail one to the front door of every fire house in New York and if anyone knows how they can come up with a fake bloody extracted hair plug to send to Joe Biden. Ron Paul is going to get jumped outside his car one of these evenings and beaten with a copy of the 9/11 Commission report.

So don’t expect any fireworks when Rudy’s campaign ends with a whimper tomorrow night. But if you open your door one of these days, and find a bald, snarling, Italian Catholic on your doorstep, you’ll know immediately that that contribution you made to the Fred Thompson campaign was the most foolish $25 you ever spent.