McCain the Petulant

Though Maureen Dowd left out the deplorable GOP voter obstruction efforts that John McCain embraced in 2008, Dowd's column sums up what McCain has become: Petty and vindictive.

With President Obama, McCain’s objections seem motivated more by vendetta than principle.

He angrily turned on his former base, the news media, during his campaign when his lame performance on the economy and his irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin got panned.

In 2000, McCain would devilishly point out Tom Brokaw or a Times journalist to town hall audiences as 'one of the last Trotskyites, left-wing, Communist, pinkos of the American media.'

In 2008, he snarled to political aides about journalists whom he had once admired, like Brokaw and Charlie Gibson, and he cut off The Times completely. He talks about the media betrayal with the same outsize scorn that he once reserved for his Viet Cong captors.

The famous twinkle is gone, replaced by an infamous bitterness.