"He barbecued for us at his Arizona cabin..."

Josh Marshall still leads the league in both sensitivity to and hatred for fawning McCain press coverage. So with the phenomenon of "tire swinging" (TPM's official term for McCain-flattering) winding down, it has to be kind of a bittersweet moment for Marshall. On the one hand, a big reason why it's winding down is because it looks like McCain's going to lose, which is a good thing. But at the same time, being the world's foremost scholar of John McCain knob-polishing was a pretty good gig.  

Fortunately Maeve Reston of the Los Angeles Times decided to give JMM one last bravura performance, a fittingly wistful retrospective on the early days of the Straight Talk Express, "as if she were Streisand to McCain's Redford."