Oh hey look it’s the one human with a soul who ever worked on the McCain campaign, and he quit, a million years ago. Here he is at that Politico/Annenberg Skool panel talking about the time Al Gore’s BlackBerry nearly stole the election in 2000 by calling for a RECOUNT, which is the word you can’t hear at the end of this clip because our video editor (NEWELL) likes to keep things mysterious. [YouTube]

David Brooks allows a made-up reader to address him as “Mr. Kierkegaard” today in his column. Here is what “Existential in Exeter” asks Søren Kierkegaard, who is David Brooks, about Culture: “All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?” David Brooks gets high and then answers — oh man, does he ANSWER — this question (which he actually wrote to himself after getting high, too). MORE »

Oh come now, will everyone please stop pickin’ on poor John McCain for his limited knowledge of the future techmologies? This is something that irks political writers on the Internet to a strange degree (probably because it means McCain cannot give them page views.) Even McCain’s best friend Jon Chait of The New Republic has been calling him “President Grampa Simpson,” which is Ageist. While many of us are more concerned about McCain for other reasons — the fact that he is solidly to the right of George W. Bush on foreign policy, for example — we understand how problematic it would be to have a president who uses Yahoo! instead of Google. And yet it’s still hilarious whenever McCain tries to defend his technological know-how to a crowd of nerds, as he did yesterday in liberal San Francisco. MORE »

DEFENSE OF THE DAY: From Mark Soohoo, McCain’s deputy “e-campaign” director: “John McCain is aware of the Internet.” MEME! [New York Times]

Last week, John McCain described his veep-vetting process, “jokingly,” as this: “You know, basically it’s a Google.” His omission of the word “search” — a Google “search” — was very shocking to every reporter and teevee personality; it showed that John McCain is OMFG so old while, in contrast, reporters and teevee personalities are so young. Anyway, this soul-crushing narrative about the proper usage of “Google” has taken another fake turn: Barack Obama mentioned “Google” three times in his speech yesterday. Correctly! And if you say “Google” three times correctly into a bathroom mirror, a magic troll appears and steals John McCain away to Narnia. [Jonathan Martin]

Silly Andrew Sullivan didn’t mention shit about Barack “The Face” Obama’s technosavvy “innovation” plan in his stupid Atlantic article, and could The Face be upset? He probably doesn’t care either, but still, his campaign sent out an e-mail furiously titled “EXPERTS PRAISE BARACK OBAMA’S TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION AGENDA” to show us just how cool he is with the technology hepcats. MORE »

Hey everybody, have you heard of the hot new gadget called the “fax machine”? Apparently you can somehow send pieces of paper through the telephone wires, but you’ve got to really roll the paper up tight so it can fit! That’s what Jonah Goldberg thinks, anyway. MORE »

Fox funnyman Neil Cavuto apparently had a nervous breakdown and is now just watching wedding videos and crying.

“Our generation is luckier than others that didn’t have the benefit of video images. Sometimes just old photos thrown in a box.”

Does that mean anything? What’s with the bizarre sentence fragment? Read Cavuto’s devastating cry for help, after the jump.

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* Congressional Democrats look to time machine to stop troop surge. [WP, NYT]
* Changing kaleidoscope of “things President Bush could’ve started instead of a war,” moves to alternative fuel technology. [WP, NYT]
* Bursting hybrid owners’ bubbles feels good. [USAT]
* Sooner or later one of the “softball” questions lobbed up at Rudy Giuliani is going to break a window, then he’ll get all crazy, kicking homeless people and yelling about “America’s Mayor’s foot in their ass.” [NYT]
* Sorry Bill Richardson, but it’s about popularity. Just how these things go. [NYT]
* Bill Clinton’s tongue has made him rich. [WP]
* Rep. Sam Johnson is the House’s Walnuts, Syria nuking jokes and all. [LAT]
* Iraqi embassy rebuilt with less “blood, sweat and tears” than, well, you know. [WP]

* Karl should’ve been doing Scotty’s job this whole time. Way to stonewall’em Karl! [Think Progress] MORE »

Fortune recently conducted some interesting interviews with a dozen newsmakers, asking them for the secrets to success and productivity in our fast-moving, high-tech world. One of the interviewees was everyone’s favorite wild-card Senator, John McCain.

According to McCain, “The hardest thing to do is to establish priorities.” Tell us about it! Should we blog about that raunchy Craigslist ad, or that stupid CNN.com headline?

Here’s the most intriguing part of Ellen McGirt’s interview with Sen. McCain:

I read my e-mails, but I don’t write any. I’m a Neanderthal — I don’t even type. I do have the rudimentary capability of calling up some Web sites, like the New York Times online, that sort of stuff. No laptop. No PalmPilot.

Reading emails, but not responding — would that we all could get away with that strategy! (Yes, we know, we never responded to that email of yours from three weeks ago. Please forgive us — you have no idea what our inbox looks like…)

So McCain doesn’t email; but maybe he uses IM? We bet his screenname is “maverick243.”

After the jump, a few more fun facts about how John McCain stays on top of the world.

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