Hardball pundits excuse McCain as too "out of it" to know what his campaign is doing in his name

The McCain campaign is getting so slimy and incoherent that his media supporters simply can't credit that the "honorable straight-shooting maverick" could possibly be aware of what is happening in his name. Here's his media supporters on MSNBC expressing their dismay at his campaign and trying to rationalize the obvious horror of it with their firmly held image of the most honorable St. John McCain.



This should be entitled "When pundits face cognitive dissonance." They just can't accept that the man they know by his media persona actually realizes how rotten his campaign for President is.

OK. So that leaves us with a choice. We have to decide whether McCain is too out of it to know what is going on in the Presidential campaign he is in charge of, or whether he is a lying opportunist who will say anything, do anything his immediate audience wants to hear while pretending to be whoever they want him to be just as long as they will vote him into the office of President.

Of course, nothing stops McCain from being both at once. But I'm not part of his media base of support, either. I can abandon the media narrative and feel no cognitive dissonance at all.

Neither choice presents a candidate that America wants to follow the incompetent George Bush.

[H/T to TPM.]