McCain/Iseman furor obscures the real story
The New York Times story and this Washington Post story on the cozy relationship between John McCain and the lobbyist Vicki Iseman have resulted in a predictable deluge of manufactured outrage from the right wing noise machine. "Manufactured" is exactly the correct word: the story isn't just about McCain's relationship with a much younger woman; it's fundamentally about McCain's connections to lobbyists he's spent the last sixteen years criticizing with such deft hypocrisy.
If this story were merely a "did he shag her or not?" tale, I doubt the right wing would have reacted so viscerally to the articles. Whispers of infidelity are merely one aspect of the stories (especially the one in the Times), which detail his hypocrisy on the whole issue of lobbying; they go far beyond the question of whether McCain's relationship with Iseman was strictly vertical or in fact had a horizontal component. If you can't refute the real story, then I guess it's more effective to drum up some outrage over a completely different topic. Changing the subject usually works pretty well, and that's exactly what the right wing have spent the last 24 hours doing.
The fact of the matter is, John McCain, one half of the sponsors of the McCain/Feingold Act, is in bed with lobbyists. Whether it's literally true or merely figurative is a sideshow and a distraction.
Conservatives love to rail against the New York Times for its supposedly liberal bias (which they never really seem capable of backing up with specific examples). The Times is one of their most cherished bogeymen, and without bogeymen, they wouldn't have much around which to rally (in fact, the Times's involvement in this story has already given McCain something to exploit in fundraising letters). Predictably, Rush and his ilk are desperate to change the subject away from McCain's relationship with K Street, since that might remind the public a little too much of the Tom DeLay/Jack Abramoff scandals.