George Will, of all people, made the case yesterday that John McCain is not suited to the presidency:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated.

[…]

McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people.

Will’s observation was on vivid display today, as John McCain suddenly suspended his campaign and asked for a postponement of Friday’s presidential debate, saying he needed to be in Washington at this time of crisis.  Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think anyone in Washington working on the financial industry bailout plan was saying “if only John McCain and Barack Obama were helping us, everything would be OK.”

Jesse Walker at Reason.com summed up McCain’s gambit thusly:

I’d rather debate pressing issues behind closed doors with my colleagues than on national TV where voters might see me.

McCain has had a rough week.  Obama is up in the polls and meddling reporters keep trying to ask his running mate questions.  It’s understandable that he might want to take on the mantle of the burdened leader, suspending his campaign for the good of the country.  But is it a good campaign strategy?  I think Barney Frank put it well:

“It’s the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys.”

From the AP:

Less than a week after balking at the Alaska Legislature’s investigation into her alleged abuse of power, Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday indicated she will cooperate with a separate probe run by people she can fire.

Sarah Palin needs to have the Bush Doctrine explained to her by Charlie Gibson:

I try to keep this blog clean, so I’m not going to type anymore right now.

You can calculate your Obama tax cut here: ObamaTaxCut.com.

The McCain campaign is getting awfully touchy since Sarah Palin came on board.  Today, at a campaign stop in Virginia, Barack Obama used a common idiom to describe the latest McCain campaign theme:

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new “change” mantra.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”

“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink.”

“We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

Playing the hurt feelings card, Jane Swift, the head of the McCain campaign’s “Palin Truth Squad”, had this response:

Speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign, former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift tonight flatly stated that Obama had called Palin a pig.

“[T]he formation of the Palin Truth Squad couldn’t have happened too soon, as we saw when Sen. Obama in Lebanon, Va., this evening uttered what I can only deem to be disgraceful comments comparing our vice presidential nominee Gov. Palin to a pig,” Swift said.

“Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology,” she said.

Later she would suggest that Obama had called McCain a stinky fish.  Seriously.

It sounds to me like Swift said something really dumb, realized it, but didn’t want to reverse herself.  So she tried to rationalize it, to make it sound not-so-dumb:

When one reporter asked Swift why she assumed the remarks were directed at Palin, Swift replied: “It seemed to me a gendered comment. There’s only one woman in the race.”

“As far as I know, she’s the only one of the four — the presidential and vice presidential candidates — who wears lipstick,” Swift said.

But like I always say, you can’t polish a turd.  (No, I’m not calling Jane Swift a turd.)