John McCain's Selective Outrage

The NY Times points out some potential hypocrises in John McCain's choices for campaign advisors (h/t The Corner):

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — Senator John McCain, intent on succeeding where his freewheeling presidential campaign of 2000 failed, is assembling a team of political bruisers for 2008. And it includes advisers who once sought to skewer him and whose work he has criticized as stepping over the line in the past.

In 2000, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the advertisements run against him by George W. Bush, then the governor of Texas, distorted his record. But he has hired three members of the team that made those commercials — Mark McKinnon, Russell Schriefer and Stuart Stevens — to work on his presidential campaign.

In 2004, Mr. McCain said the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth advertisement asserting that Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had not properly earned his medals from the Vietnam War was “dishonest and dishonorable.” Nonetheless, he has hired the firm that made the spots, Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, which worked on his 2000 campaign, to work for him again this year.

In October, Mr. McCain’s top adviser expressed public displeasure with an advertisement against former Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat of Tennessee, that some saw as having racist overtones for suggesting a flirtation between Mr. Ford, who is black, and a young, bare-shouldered white woman, played by a blond actress.

The Republican committee that sponsored the spot had as its leader Terry Nelson, a former Bush campaign strategist whom Mr. McCain hired as an adviser last spring. In December, just weeks after the Ford controversy broke, Mr. McCain elevated Mr. Nelson to the position of national campaign manager.

I've always felt that McCain would say whatever the press would approve of, and his previous opposition to some of the entities mentioned above got him a lot of favorable press at the time (he was even being promoted by the press as a running mate for Kerry for awhile). I'd be more impressed with "Mr. Straight Talk" if he stood by his opposition to the tough campaign tactics he previously voiced and refused to do business with these firms.

However, McCain wants to win, not stand on any particular principle. Hence, the selective outrage.

And then there's this:

"Even though I am going to be supporting the Democratic nominee, I do think that John McCain would make a great president."

That's from Senator Russ Feingold, one of the most stridently liberal Democrats in Washington and co-author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law which sought to remove freedom of speech from our campaigns. So, conservatives, how does that make you feel?