Sleaze. Again. And McCain. And again.

Stick around long enough on the planet and you acquire some instinct for separating the good guys from the bad guys.  It's not that John McCain is so very, very bad.  It's just that he's got the look of a sleaze and he is a sleaze. If we were Republican voters, we'd have kept a wary eye on the man.  Since there's no risk of voting Republican in these precincts, we wink and nod and back off.  But it's interesting to see the New York Times lay the ethical compromises out in an article about John McCain.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect ...

Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and ...

He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run ...

Mr. Keating, his family and his business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The banker gave Mr. McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of Congressional ethics rules (he later said it was an oversight and ...

In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain’s committee staff for seven years before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.  Mr. McCain’s friends dismiss questions about his ties to lobbyists, arguing that ...

Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with ...

The McCain campaign spits at the New York Times for digging into this.  McCain, of course, has never never...

We have also been on the planet long enough to have known, or known about, others who spent time in bamboo crates or other incommodious lodgings, courtesy of the north Vietnamese. They returned home to a quiet, less self-promoting life as teachers or lawyers or (occasionally) permanent vagrants, not getting the sustained credit Senator McCain has enjoyed.  They just live their lives quietly, without blonde lobbyists and self-promotion, without the cover of their military uniforms.