Julia

It's about time we started paying some serious attention to Senator McCain's personal myth, don't you think? Because the odds are it's what America is being asked to vote for in the fall.

The usual movement conservative suspects are demanding that McCain embrace them in the general election even though the right-wing base of their party rejected them in the primaries. Luckily, they're not nearly as far apart as you might think on the issues they really care about. Take, for instance, torture.

Even with Obama's surprise Hulk Hogan endorsement, Democrats are woefully behind in the celebrity tough guy endorsement race (unsurprisingly, icons of manliness whose opponents are paid to lose to them on camera seem to be breaking for the Republicans).

One of the arguments for Rudy Giuliani's inevitability was that if he were on the ballot, a Republican candidate would have a shot at New York. Turns out the pundits were right. That candidate is John McCain.

You may have been wondering why conservative stalwart Rush Limbaugh is so enthusiastic about a (when it's convenient) pro-choice socialized-healthcare-supporting not-evangelical-christian government-interventionist moderate governor who abandoned the heartland for the liberal hellmouth of Massachusetts. I'm here for you.

Some of the business strategies that made Mitt Romney a very rich and successful businessman were cutting jobs, busting unions, and avoiding taxes. Some question whether that experience would be useful in running a government.

America's Mayor™, who spent $3 million on his fourth-place finish in New Hampshire, wants us to know that New Hampshire wasn't a sign of how his campaign was going to do moving forward. True enough. In New Hampshire, he wasn't in fifth place behind Fred Thompson. Also, back then his staff was still getting paid.

David Brooks, as usual, has the little people a little bit wrong.

Amy Sullivan, newly-minted Time editor, has a difficult relationship with expediency.

Hell hath no fury like Mr. Clinton's most prominent anonymous detractor scorned, and he takes a satirical (not that it's labelled that way) whack at a few folks who annoy him in the year end issue of Time (in print, where the stuff he doesn't want factchecked goes). Among the folks he celebrates for political courage: Sen. McCain, who thinks torture is bad (but we should let the fruits of it be used in court); Sen. Clinton, for having a healthcare plan (when the last one was a Great Big Legendary Disaster); Sen's Biden and Obama, for running against their base, even if they were too tentative about it; and all the Democratic candidates, who want to raise your taxes by bagging the Bush tax cuts (apparently only people who make a great deal of money read Time). Then there's Mr. Huckabee.