America apparently forgot about 9/11, because President Obama is rolling back all the important and effective new national security policies of the Bush administration, like secret CIA prisons and extraordinary rendition of uncharged terrorism suspects to foreign countries where they'll be conveniently tortured. And he's closing Guantanamo! This means there is no more "War on Terror," and we lost, because there is still terror, obviously—specifically we are still terrified of bats, and the very real possibility that there will never be an Arrested Development movie. (Curse you, Cera!)

As the Washington Post points out, we can all retreat back into this pre-9/11 fairy tale of not needing to betray the fundamental principles of law and order and the founding document of the country because those unconstitutional policies kept us safe enough to, as we said, forget about 9/11. Welcome back, 2000! We're psyched to use Napster again!

Oh, also it being 2000 again means that Senator John McCain of Arizona is a maverick, and liberals and journalists can all love him, again. He is a "maverick" because he bucked his party and demanded the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The balls on him! Only all the other Republican senators excepting two actual mavericks had the guts to do that!

This is what is so wonderful about being back in 2000—we can go back to our comforting naivety and unquestioning acceptance of established political narratives. John McCain is a maverick, adhering to the Constitution is a luxury of safe times, and Gladiator is a great movie.

It's an end-of-the-year miracle! It has it all! Political sex scandals, shoddy reporting, lawsuits, and the death of print! Vicki Iseman was a telecommunications lobbying who got super-close to Commerce Committee chairman John McCain. McCain coincidentally suddenly became a great friend to the telecoms, around this time, and McCain was writing letters to regulators on behalf of her clients. Then Iseman was showing up at campaign events with McCain, and flying around on corporate jets with McCain, and "some of the senator's advisers" became concerned that they were secretly kissing each other when no one was looking.

McCain aide John Weaver staged a dramatic Union Station confrontation with Iseman, telling her to stay the hell away from the Senator and asking her to stop telling everyone how close they were.

All of this was revealed in a long Times story, published in February, that got no play on TV and scarcely much traction in the blogs even. Jim Rutenberg and three others all pitched in to report the story, which was the subject of tense negotiations between the McCain campaign and the paper, and between the Times Washington bureau and editor Bill Keller, and Drudge was involved, and it was a big hand-wringing media moment for a while instead of a "ha ha old man McCain had an affair with a lady who looks creepily like his wife" moment, sadly.

And the affair itself, real or not, became sort of immaterial to the fuzzily edited story, which became instead about how John McCain's self-confidence in his own honor made him blind to the many improper relationships he cultivated, a narrative that popped back up when John McCain couldn't understand why everyone thought his campaign was so dishonorable later in the year.

So now Vicki Iseman, the lobbyist who had a too-publicly flirtatious or maybe romantic relationship with John McCain, is suing the Times for defamation.

A Washington lobbyist is suing The New York Times over an article that she says gave the false impression she had an affair with Sen. John McCain in 1999.

Vicki L. Iseman filed the $27 million defamation suit in U.S. District Court in Richmond on Tuesday. It also names as defendants the Times' executive editor, its Washington bureau chief and four reporters.

But, you know, all the facts of the story were true, and it said only that aides became concerned about the possible impression of an improper relationship, not that anything untoward happened, and McCain's attempt to deny the details of the story back in February failed spectacularly. But then, we are not lawyers. It was nice of her to wait until months after the election ended, though, in order to not bring more attention to this amusing story of how John McCain loves lobbyists soooooo much.

Andrew Sullivan! The gay Catholic conservative British blog-evangelizing Obama-supporter has posted more words investigating the weird circumstances of Sarah Palin's pregnancy than maybe anyone but our own Cajun Boy. Today he has another bombshell: a photo of Sarah Palin looking not that fat three weeks before the birth of Trig!

She does look, well, fatter than she did after the birth of Trig, but not as fat as she looked some other time she was pregnant. Sullivan is investigating!

Actually, the Dish went out and interviewed eight of the leading obstetricians in the country and laid out all the facts of the case and asked the experts for their take. While none would say that this pregnancy could not have happened, and none would comment on a case they hadn't examined personally, all of them said it was one of the strangest and unlikeliest series of events they had ever heard of and found Palin's decision to forgo medical help for more than a day after her water broke and risk the life of her unborn child on a log airplane trip to be reckless beyond measure.

We, of course, are as guilty as anyone of devoting unneeded additional attention to this dimwit, but we have one more month of getting paid by pageviews.

Andrew Sullivan also has this choice line, a classic of conspiratorial insinuation: "Maybe I am crazy to even wonder. Or maybe we have witnessed one of the biggest frauds in American political history and the biggest failures among the American media in a very, very long time."

Yes, maybe. And maybe a monkey with Downs Syndrome will fly out of our butt!!

(We're really, really sorry for that.)

Bair was appointed by George W. Bush to run the FDIC, and her term ends in 2011. She's a Republican, but she's well-respected and liked by everyone on both sides of the aisle. She's been running the efforts to rework mortgages and keep people in their homes, and she's all for "helping Main Street in addition to Wall Street," and lots of liberals had hoped to see her maybe get a bigger role in an Obama administration. Here is what Barney Frank said about her:

“I think part of the problem now, to be honest, is Sheila Bair has annoyed the ‘old boys’ club,’” Frank said today. “To some extent, bank regulation and mortgage foreclosure have made a situation where we have several regulators up in the tree house with a ‘no girls allowed’ sign — and it’s aimed at Sheila Bair - - who’s been really good.”

Wait a minute—Republican who took on her own party and the 'old boys club'? Sheila Bair is an actual maverick. A real-life one, not the kind that is Mavericky based only on superficial identity-based personality traits! Why does Geithner want her gone?

Apparently Geithner "clashed" with Bair over aid to Citigroup, a position she was goddamn right to clash with him over because that particular bailout was a mess. But it means she's "not a team player" and it also means we're worried about the Obama economic team again.

Jane Mayer wrote a very informative piece for this week's New Yorker about how all the chattering classes and cocktail circuit insiders created and sold the Myth of Sarah Palin.

While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.

The Standard brought William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Michael Gerson to meet Palin. They all fell in love when she said grace really well and her daughter said something cute and then they took a helicopter ride and talked about how great it was to dump waste into lakes. Barnes went home and wrote a story about how she was so great. Kristol basically fell in love and began talking about her incessantly, all the time, until Chris Wallace told him to shut up.

A few weeks after that cruise, the National Review boys came around! This time Palin met Rich Lowry, Robert Bork, John Bolton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Dick Morris—we will hand it to the NR, their parties are somehow creepier than the Standard's. Dick Morris apparently talked ot Palin for an hour or two, and he was probably salivating. This is the saddest part of this story:

Clearly, Palin has taken this advice to heart. Still, when the moment came for Morris and other guests to depart, Palin was sad to see the Washington insiders go. Hanson recalled, “She said, ‘Hey—does anyone want to stay for dinner? We’re going to eat right now.’ She also invited everyone to come back the next day. ‘If any of you are in the area, all you have to do is knock. Yell upstairs, I’ll be right down.’ ”

And so, yes, as you can see, the media elite created this monster, and the monster is desperate for their approval as well. Hell, she'll even do the requisite Saturday Night Live appearance. And yes, the GOP will happily take the stage with sad pseudo-celebs like Hank Williams Jr, but in capitulating to the elite conservative media opinion-makers, Palin is probably going down a slightly safer path than McCain did himself when he enlisted the love and support of the regular mainstream media in 2000.

As we all remember, the media was once McCain's base, with heavy breathing moderates like Rich Cohen and Joe Klein swooning over their unprecedented access to the potential GOP nominee for president.

McCain loved the adoration and the attention, and made an effort to keep it up through 2008, but the eventual fall-out, while precipitated by McCain's shitty campaigning, was probably inevitable. Because once he's the actual nominee for President on the Republican ticket, he needs to be a Republican. His appeal, before, was that he was basically a noble loser. This year, he wanted to win. And winning, he was informed, involved being a douchebag.

But as much as McCain's politics and strategy are all dictated by his personal animosities and perceived slights (his visceral distaste for Obama comes from Obama snubbing him years ago over some bullshit legislation followed by a couple other slights McCain took a bit too personally), his new distaste for the Media Establishment rings hallow to those who remember the barbecue party of just a few months ago, but it's probably sincere. He's fucking furious that the jackals abandoned him and call him a liar just for lying all the time. Listen to McCain's chief hagiographer, Mark Salter:

We also talked about Salter's current view of the press: "I think the media is driven by a need to see this history happen," he said. "And I think they've rationalized it, they think they're on the level with McCain, that he's not the old McCain. But he is the old McCain. He just doesn't know what happened to the old press corps."

They're in the bubble. They know it's the "same McCain" and it's not fair that the elitists don't like the old McCain anymore. We've also argued that the "he's not the man I used to love" line is pathetic and basically means they just loved him back when he made them feel special and loved.

And now, trying to play to the Beltway Elites of National Review has made McCain seem intolerable and erratic to Beltway Elites like Peggy Noonan and David Brooks and only Jonah Goldberg still likes him.

He made direct, pointed criticisms of Bush's handling of the war that closely mirrored criticisms lobbed by liberals like Weisberg! What a maverick! Of course whether or not McCain genuinely believes this is immaterial because conveniently he only comes off so rebellious and principled and independent when he's sitting down for private chats with liberal journalists.

Remember how he told Arianna Huffington that he didn't vote for George W. Bush when he was hanging out with her at a fancy elitist Hollywood dinner party? And then, later, he wouldn't admit that anymore? Funny, that. Back to cozying up with the Christian Right and announcing that we'll win in Iraq no matter what the cost!

McCain at Rock Bottom [Slate]

The man just naturally says whatever the hell his audiences want to hear. This is why, in small, intimate settings, everyone comes off impressed with John McCain's honesty and no-bullshit approach. This is why the media loves him. He's chatty, he's charming, and he will immediately key in on exactly how to convince you that he's on your side. And he'll crack a few off-color jokes!

The greatest trick the bullshit artist ever played was convincing his audience that he's innately honest. And John McCain is old and senile enough that he probably does believe his own hype now, which is how he can so comfortably categorically deny things that he's on record as saying.

And it's why people like Arianna and Jon Stewart feel so confused and betrayed! Because he told them, face-to-face, no-bullshit, whatever the hell they wanted to hear, back in the day. And then, because he has to run for president, he went and said and did the opposite things. McCain hasn't been on the Daily Show once since he clinched the GOP nomination. But tomorrow, he'll appear on the show for his record 13th time. It'll probably be an awkward interview.

• It Probably Doesn't Work Too Well I know, I know, his mom is in great shape. Dude is still 71.
• Untouched By Cindy Since 1989 Even if John McCain didn't have sex with that lobbyist, the only reason to seek any kind of companionship with a woman is because your wife isn't touching your penis.
• If There's Any Hair Left, It's White According to another listicle we read, hair down there turns gray and falls out with age. Once again, John McCain is old.
• It Is Untroubled By Ethical Lapses In this respect, John McCain's penis is no different than yours.
• It Stays The Course Iraq is winnable, and given the proper attention, and enough time (it may be a long time), his penis, too, will succeed in its mission.

In McCain's huge rebuttal to the Times, McCain claimed no one from Iseman's firm, Alcade & Fay, or her client Paxson Communications asked McCain to send a letter to the FCC. It's not a particularly believable claim, but it's handy that its refutation comes from a sworn deposition delivered by the Maverick Arizona Senator in 2002.

"I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."

While McCain said "I don't recall" if he ever directly spoke to the firm's lobbyist about the issue—an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named—"I'm sure I spoke to [Paxson]." McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could "possibly be an appearance of corruption"—even though McCain denied doing anything improper.

McCain's campaign insists there is some niggling way in which their former blanket denial could still be true, but it's a hopeless cause as in the deposition transcript McCain basically says variations on "Paxson called me up and I spoke to him" a good half-dozen times.

It's hard to tell this early whether this will move the "McCain is a hypocrite" story or whether "the Times should be ashamed of itself" will continue to dominate.

(Sadly, no news on the lobbyist-fucking angle of the story.)

A Hole in McCain's Defense? [Newsweek]