redblueamerica.com

Funny you bring this up. The guys over at PowerLine today liked to a Wall Street Journal editorial that talks about how the McCain campaign's own activities in the last few months have put The Maverick into an absurd pickle -- thanks to the law he wrote.

The money quote:

Last week, we wrote about the $3 million loan his campaign took out to keep his campaign afloat in November, putting up its fund-raising lists and a life insurance policy as collateral. If the campaign had gone south, Mr. McCain would still have been able to tap into donors from his position as a powerful Senator on the Commerce Committee to make good on the debt. More cash started to come in, but now it turns out that Mr. McCain's campaign looked into borrowing another $1 million at its moment of peril before the New Hampshire primary, this time pledging its eligibility for federal matching campaign funds.

Here's where the explanation gets really lawyered up. The McCain campaign hurries to say it didn't actually surrender its public funding certification as collateral, oh no. The campaign applied to the Federal Election Commission for matching funds, and once that application was approved went to a bank and opened a line of credit based on the possibility that they might someday reapply for matching funds if the campaign faltered. "We never claimed that the matching funds were collateral for the loan," says McCain lawyer Trevor Potter. "This was all a hypothetical future transaction." (We wish we could get bank loans like that.)

Yeah. Try to make sense of that. Good work, Sen. McCain.

I agree, Ben, that Keller's justification for running the story -- not to mention his shock at the negative reaction -- has now become bigger than the story itself. Which is hard to do, but The New York Times was up to the job. Keller emerged from his office to speak to his "public" on Friday, and his reasoning revealed a lot.

As I noted in one of my Friday blog posts:

Keller seems to be saying that a man who strives to live his public life with honor -- and who encourages others to live honorably -- is perversely courting public ruin. And it is the duty of the most powerful newspaper in the world to do its part by running a story that insinuates, but can never really pin down, the allegation that he cheated on his wife?

... If all that stuff turns out to be false and doesn't end up destroying a good man's political and private life, are we supposed to just shrug our shoulders with Keller and say, "No harm, no foul"?

Yeah. Right. I've always thought that conservatives would eventually get behind McCain. The New York Times has only accelerated the process. McCain ought to be getting his lawyers on the case. No. I'm not talking libel. Keller might very well have contributed an "in kind" contribution to a campaign that runs afoul of McCain-Feingold.