Having denounced the anti-Obama North Carolina Republican ad (see previous post) in the most portentous, self-righteous terms since Bill Clinton last wagged a finger at the media, John McCain dismounted from his favorite high horse, Driven Snow, a silver gelding by Ego Polisher out of Peacock Preen, and took a pot shot or two at the Democratic front-runner's connection with Jeremiah Wright.

He did this not from any sordid considerations of common sense or the squalid need to hold his opponent up to proper scrutiny by the electorate. No, he was guided by the always pure and noble principle of following Obama's lead. You see, the freshman Senator from Illinois had graciously declared his pastor problem a "legitimate" political issue.

With that Our Johnny was out the gate baying for blood. Well not for blood exactly and it was more a kittenish miaow than a full-throated hound dog in full pursuit of an escaped felon, but still in McCain World it's billed as a Tomahawk into the bridge of an enemy carrier. Yowza, yowza!

McCain apparently thinks that he can tiptoe like Tiny Tim through the tulips all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What a tosspot! Like every other candidate in this execrable election the more you get to see, hear and smell him the more repellent he becomes. [UPDATE: Think I'm a bit OTP? Go here for Pat Buchanan's devastating exposé of Mac's mentality.] How can a nation of 250 million souls - that's a quarter of a billion, folks, - end up with such a wretched cohort of candidates to choose from: Hillary Fishwife, Barack Slimeball and John Crawthumper! It's like putting some ordinary innocent looking everyday object under a microscope and recoiling in horror at the death-dealing bugs swarming about.

In short, it's a bloody disaster.

Believe me, whichever of these thrown-togethers manages to hoodwink their way into office it won't take long before we're all looking back nostalgically to the halcyon days of Bush 43's wise and wondrous rule. At least the guy could laugh at himself we'll say in retrospective awe. Hey, he kept us safe for seven years. Sure, Iraq was a fiasco but, say what you like, it was no Vietnam. And his spouse was an actual human being! And you could still have a beer with him.

The terrible trio we're now faced with are individually and collectively an appallingly dysfunctional lot. As are their life-partners, Bill, Michelle, Cindy. Not one of this six-pack is...you know...normal! In fact they're all disquietingly peculiar.

Obama is poster boy for the truth of the aphorism "By His Friends Shall Ye Know Him", an individual who turns out to be the polar opposite of what he brazenly sell himself as. He sprouts - a la Pallas Athene - fully grown from the unlovely brow of the New Left and smoothly leverages his race to become a mainstream political superstar whose cloudy pieties mask an extreme ideology which can only find expression in furthering the Hard Left social engineering project that has blighted the country for forty years.

Hillary is a crook but these are politicians so we can't be too picky. She's also a pathological liar who parades her delusions on prime time TV. An obvious hysteric, she attempts to hide her emotional turmoil under a facade of ruthless ambition, elitist entitlement and Marxoid control-freakery. For her the Presidency is the only proper pay-off for the years of Bubbafication which she has endured. It has colonized her very being just as the thought of Jody Foster took possession of John Hinkley's twisted soul.

As for McCain, he's a simpler case because a less intelligent one. But what he manifestly lacks in brains he makes up for with ego. He is in the wrong party because no party would satisfy him. He cannot submit - he sees it as submission - to the demands of group membership at any level. He is not a team player because being a member of a team - even its captain - endangers his fragile sense of self. In Freudian terms his Superego is only vindicated by making a secret deal with his Id.

Thus he veers between obsequious "respect" for his opponents, otherwise known as fawning, and an abiding rage against members of his own party who by their very existence circumscribe his profound and ever urgent need to stand out, a man apart. The Straight Talk Express runs on very narrow gauge tracks and zig-zags willfully between strange, far-flung stops.

As for the spouses - oy vey! Cindy is gobsmackingly rich, and an out and out stunner. Twenty five years old when he met her, she was a true Arizona Princess and surely a fitting reason for Honest John, Heroic John, Honorable John to dump his wife, Carol, the mother of his three eldest children and a former model who was crippled and disfigured in a car crash while he was a POW in North Vietnam.

Yet, though pleasing - rich, beautiful, elegant, neither a slattern nor a schemer nor a sanctimonious virago -what's not to like? - and infinitely preferable to her two co-consorts, Cindy has an eerie clenched-fist air about her. There is nothing of Laura Bush's "soccer mom" normality in her.

She always seems between nervous breakdowns. On stage she is immobile rather that still as if balancing upon an inner tightrope rather than simply being there for her man. Mostly her smiles are second hand like moonlight, borrowed to little purpose and less effect. The odd flash lights up her face and reveals a true loveliness that fascinates rather than seduces. For all that she seems diminished and sad, lonely. A remote and uninvolved figure even with herself, she stands before us yet is almost somewhere else, as if her presence is a kind of alibi for her far away thoughts and wandering soul.

Michelle, of course, is completely present, body, mind and furious soul. There is nothing but surface about her. No hidden dreams, secret sorrows, skulking hurts disturb the titanic tenor of her way. She is a volcano with the magma all on top. She drinks gall and spews bile. Like a teenage princess only smugness or resentment animate her strangely adolescent features. Her self-willed fury is nothing but pettishness given a podium to pout from. Her highly buffed sense of grievance is merely entitlement turned inside out, the frustrated longing of the stubbornly immature.

The more she is given what she has not really earned the more she proclaims herself deserving of everything else. The little she has been denied is inflated into a monument to an overarching injustice which sets all the trappings of success at nought. She identifies with those who truly have little or even less because not to have it all is as great, as unpardonable an offense as not to have anything at all. She is the Solipsistic Sixties come home to roost.

And Bill? What is there left to say except like the pathetic punch drunk has-been of so many boxing dramas "he coulda been a contender". Undoubtedly the Greatest President We Almost Had, he spent his life relentlessly playing Iago to his own Othello. The remaining years stretch bleakly ahead allowing him ample time to contemplate the still-born glories of a Presidency that never was. His desperate shills will continue to peddle the paltry excuses and tawdry lies, but the man himself, unique among his acolytes, is too intelligent to believe them.

Yet he had his brief Camelot. Without him Ireland would still be at war. There are people moving about that troubled isle right this very minute, laughing, drinking, loving, swearing, sipping tea, nursing an infant, driving to the seaside who would be under the sodden earth except for William Jefferson Clinton, the only American President, despite all the March 17 maunderings over White House shamrock, that gave a toss for the Irish who stayed at home.

When he dies set his body in his native soil but bury his heart in a quiet valley on the great Atlantic's eastern fringe where the drifting rain will keep its resting place forever fresh, forever green and the growling seas stand guard - eternally.

Whoever of the three unlovelies becomes the forty third successor to George Washington next January it is more than improbable that they will earn such an epitaph.

Of course we can always hope.

And pray.