We got a bond/ Like McCain and strawberry blondes

That is a lyric in need of a good a home. Feel free to drop it into a caring and particular slow jam, one that captures the groovy kind of love between a presidential candidate and his lobbyist.

I for one think this story does John McCain no favors, even if the New York Times clearly didn't get the goods and is never able to follow through. The way the right deals with this, or any brewing scandal, is by decrying it immediately as another example of the perfidies of the liberal, mainstream, insider-obsessed media run amock. The right doesn't wait for the other shoe to drop—the right chops both feet off at the ankles.

Though the GOP and its sympathizers know when and how to deploy the conservative bluster machine, will they? In a post titled "A Lesson for John McCain," Michelle Malkin writes: "If you lie down with MSM dogs, you wake up with stories like this." I think that if the right doesn't form a unified defense for McCain there's a risk that McCain's straight-talk enchantment over the media will be broken. Therefore I think it's highly likely that McCain's straight-talk enchantment over the media will be broken.

UPDATE: Snark aside, I'm with Yglesias: This is a loathsome move on behalf of the Times. It's innuendo as reporting and I'd be outraged if McCain were my man. McCain has a substantive scandal on his hands related to Iseman and corruption, so the paper of record doesn't need to resort to wink-wink, nudge-nudge allegations in order to report a shady discovery.

UPDATE II: Spencer is calling (well, fictionalizing) Huckabee for McCain's Vice President. With those shadowy allegations of an affair sure to eat up headlines, McCain will need the light of Huckabee's virtue more than he will need a Wall Street–vetted veep.