Now that he’s dead, McCain is a Good Republican. But when he was alive, and a threat to other people’s power, he was treated as a racist, a warmonger, and potentially unstable. He was vilified by the press, and by some of the very politicians who were speaking on his behalf. In the South Carolina primary, George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, for example, used push polling to circulate the (false) rumor that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Bush operatives also, according to a lengthy article in Vanity Fair, spread rumors that Cindy McCain was addicted to painkillers, and that John McCain visited prostitutes and was mentally unstable as a result of his time in a prisoner of war camp. Bush won the primary, and the nomination, and was on hand Saturday to praise McCain’s integrity at his funeral.

In 2008, with McCain running for president again, the New York Times ran an unsubstantiated claim that McCain was having an affair with a female lobbyist, only to add a “note to readers” a year later (after the election was over, and Barack Obama was sworn in) disavowing the story: “An article published on February 21, 2008, about Senator John McCain and his record as an ethics reformer who was at times blind to potential conflicts of interest included references to Vicki Iseman, a Washington lobbyist. The article did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust.”

One need only read the article above the “note to readers” to realize how absurd that claim is.