Want to remove all slime from the election this fall and limit debate strictly to the issues? Rick Hertzberg knows how:

The solution is obvious. Obama should ask McCain to be his running mate. McCain should ask Obama to be his. And both should say yes.

A campaign pitting an Obama-McCain ticket against a McCain-Obama ticket would absolutely guarantee a general-election campaign that would be about The Issues and nothing but The Issues…

Amazing stuff from Arianna Huffington about John McCain, whose habit of serial lying would have long since sunk any Democratic candidate:

At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. “I didn’t vote for George Bush” the man confessed. “I didn’t either,” his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).

The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush — both literally and metaphorically — he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn’t stomach voting for in 2000.