But there's no way this can work out for them.  There was already broad, general agreement that McCain was there as a political stunt in the first place.  And at the end of the day, the Republicans just look incredibly reckless and irresponsible.

Their solution: Throw a hissy fit, put the entire country into a state of high anxiety for a few days, propose some cockamamie plan of their own that only their base would like, and finally go along with a plan that's very close to P/D.  They can then go home and make lots of noise about how they fought the Washington insiders and won, blah blah blah.

And McCain will crow the loudest about how he showed leadership and Obama voted for "his" restructured plan.

It's one enormous political ploy.  In poker terms, McCain and the Republicans are going all-in with not their money, but the whole freaking economy, all to win reelection.

So who was engaging in politics here?

I'd of course like to know exactly what this aide to Boehner said. Given he's an aide to Boehner, somehow I just doubt that, as he actually expressed it, it came out the way the NY Times reporter cast it. I don't trust these reporters to paraphrase anything without distortion.

Look, the reality is that, independent of McCain, Conservatives were going to have an enormous problem with a governmental program of the size of 700 Billion dollars. Indeed, one would expect that, as a right wing Republican, McCain himself would have an enormous problem with such a program.

Why imagine that the balking of both the Congressional Conservatives and McCain himself at this package is not sincere? On ideological grounds, if McCain was to be consistent, wouldn't one expect him to be seeking some alternative to this bailout, or at least some way of shaping it far more to his point of view, and that of the Conservatives?

If McCain is the right wing politician you and most people claim he is, shouldn't he be doing exactly what he's doing, simply out of ideological consistency? Why claim that he's simply throwing a monkey wrench into the works?

I think what we really have to see is what McCain and the Republicans come up with as an alternative. My guess is that it won't be pretty, and that it won't be so because it will conform to their own ideology.

If you're going to attack McCain, why don't you wait until you see what he and his cohorts actually produce, and attack it on policy grounds?

I certainly wouldn't conclude that McCain and the Republicans aren't wedded to their ideology, and would, if Presidential politics weren't at issue, simply throw it over for a "bipartisan" bailout plan -- which, however, violates that ideology 700 Billion ways.

And honestly I would not trust -- as you seem to do -- anything that the Democrats have to say about how this deal went down, as if they only speak the truth and the whole truth, and are incapable of distortion. Dodd and Frank and Reid and Pelosi have distorted in the past, haven't they? I think we've seen that by now, haven't we? Of course, the same caveat applies in spades to the Republicans.

And neither would I trust the media's accounts. Even the quote I started with above, and the reporter's paraphrase (wouldn't it be nice to see an actual quote from the aide, so that we can evaluate what he said on its own merits? Think we'll ever get that?), show how careful one must be about how they might twist things to make a point.