Today's honoree: Bob Herbert of the New York Times, who in "Running While Black" gives the McCain campaign the smackdown it so richly deserves, and which the television news has lacked the cojones to do. Yesterday MSNBC was All Race Card, All the Time, which of course means I won the bet about whether the suicide of Bruce Ivins would be announced and then buried as quickly as he, and the anthrax case, is about to be.

Money quote from Mr. Herbert:

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

Honorable mention: Joe Conason, in Salon: "Wanting the White House in the worst way."

Money quote:

By the time McCain spoke up feebly against the Swift boat campaign, the damage had been done -- to him as well as to Kerry. He had undergone a public transformation into a willing instrument of lesser men who trampled on his character and his honor, even his patriotism, just as his campaign is now seeking to do to Obama.

"They know no depths," he had complained wearily to reporters on his "Straight Talk" bus during the 2000 primaries. Now he has once more sold himself to those same forces, hoping that they will at last usher him into the White House. In his concession speech after the South Carolina primary, he said, "I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way."

That is what has changed.