Related Book: After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful

My friend Matt Welch appeared on Bill Moyers to talk about John McCain. Video and Transcript.

MATT WELCH: John McCain has an ideology that’s little appreciated and little understood by the press. He receives more adoring press probably than any Republican that I can think of in my lifetime, or certainly the last 20 years. And by the time you’re done reciting all of the marvelous things in his biography and talk about how much fun it was on the Straight Talk Express, there’s not a whole lot of time to talk about where he came up with his ideas about what the government should or should not do.

His ideas about what the government should do are basically, he wants to restore your faith and my faith and Mickey’s faith in the idea of America being a shining city on the hill. He wants to restore our faith in governing institutions, in the federal government, in other words, and use the federal government as a sort of blunt instrument to go after anything that makes us cynical about those institutions and the greatness of America. It’s a sort of national greatness conservatism which has a kind of militaristic component, let’s say, in which we are all supposed to sort of sacrifice ourselves to the greater cause, the higher power of American nationalism.

Now, go buy Matt’s book: McCain: The Myth of a Maverick

This isn’t intended to be a political statement in any manner, but Glen Johnson is my new hero.

YouTube Direkt Glen Johnson of AP does his job

Isn’t it ludicrous for a campaign staffer to tell are reporter, “Be professional. Do your job. Don’t be argumentative with the candidate.”

What, canidates are supposed to get a free ride from the press?

UPDATE: This is rich. Romeny reveals that Johnson asked his question not because it was a tough question deserving an answer, but because Johnson hadn’t had good food to eat, enough sleep or a place to sit:

LENO: I’ve got to ask you something. You had a run-in with an aggressive reporter yesterday. Tell us about that. Tell us what happened. We’ll show the tape.

ROMNEY: Well, you know, it’s kind of a normal thing. These guys have a responsibility to be adversarial, and, you know, we don’t treat them real well. The guys that follow us in the Presidential race come in a whole group. We put them in the back of the aircraft. We feed them lousy food. We wake them up early in the morning to go to events, and then as you’ll see in this clip, I think, we don’t give them chairs to sit on either. So they have a tough go of it, but they’re doing their job.

A book about Mitt: Mitt Romney: The Man, His Values and His Vision