He is a cranky old grandpa.  Everyone knows that. He probably needed a nap.  Expect more to come.

"Shame on you" Clinton and McCain have crossed the hothead threshold.  Obama, he's just got a speech.

I was reading the transcript and was worried that it wasn't on tape.

she called it an "incident"

I want an immediate time-out for all three of the presidential candidates. They should brush their teeth, put on their pajamas, drink some cocoa and go to bed. All of them (and I am a pod for Obama) need some sleep and perspective.

If people think this is McCain being a hothead just wait until the stories about how he treated his colleagues in the Senate surface.  Seriously, that is a very restrained and focused McCain.  That is him with the voice in his head saying: "Don't curse.  Don't raise your voice.  Don't stomp".

We need to use his explosive temperment factor judiciously.  

Some ground rules I would use if I was running the Democratic presidential campaign (thank goodness I am not as I have the reverse Midas Touch!)

*No known representative of the campaign should ever bring up the issue.  They should stick with McCain is not qualified as commander in chief because his policies are awful (100 years, Iran, etc.)
*Unaffiliated supporters should at every turn do what they can to provoke the all-but-inevitable McCain outburst by attending his speeches, letting comments drop in media interviews.  The Clinton or Obama campaign obviously should be more circumspect ("Sen. Clinton do you agree with Dem. X that McCain is too unstable to be President?  Well, I don't know anything about that. You will have to ask X why they think McCain is too hotheaded to be an effective president").
*We should find some Vietnam Vets who have some vague recollection of sharing the same square mile with McCain to state that he was not all that much on the battlefield because he was so gung-ho and hotheaded that he undermined the mission...OK just kidding.

McCain may feel that a YouTube video of him berating an NYT reporter can only help him with the yahoos.

That's great.  The really funny part is that Elisabeth Bumiller is one of the all-time great fluffers in the press.  Bush is shredding the Constitution and she writes articles about what songs he has on his iPod.  That's the kind of journalist she is.

So if you can't even be pleasant to someone like that... well, you do kind of wonder about how McCain manages to have a love affair with the press.

This is "flipping out"? Other than giving Fox a chance to needle him (not that they need any excuses), this isn't going to create any news.

I don't doubt for a minute that McCain has a terrible temper, and I'm sure if he truly showed it, it would help our side a lot. But this ain't that...

Needs to make a McCain spoof of the 3am/red phone ad. Preferrably where he ends up pressing the button in a fit of rage and it ends with the "Dr. Strangelove" montage of nuclear detonations.

He didn't so much seem angry as a little bit crazed. What was all that "you know this" or "you know that" etc. Why would he assume this particular reporter knew this before she asked about it? Why does it matter? Wouldn't it have been easier to just answer the question and move on? Definitely makes him seem a bit on the crazy side.

McCain's weakness in the General isn't his character. This is a mistake.

His weakness is the same as Hillary's: there is a significant fixed percentage of people the respective parties that will never vote for the candidate. Ever. Ever.

There are GOP that will slide under a gas truck and taste their own blood before they vote for Walnuts.

The reason isn't his character its his willingness to cross the aisle and make deals. Take chances.

I agree with Tom Daschle. I think McCain's career has been about taking chances and I am not too impressed with the attacks on him; I believe there will be a finite - mark well I said the word finite - chance that the debate in the general will have depth and be worth actually tuning into.

If you want to go negative, take a page from Karl Rove. His failed policies and techniques always
delivered division and the signal to noise ratio always dropped when he was in there. He'd be excited to hear that someone is picking apart comments like McCain's, because he failed to graduate from college and spent all his time working for George Bush creating an environment in which comments like this feed a 24 hour news cycle but mask the real issues and keep the voters disinformed or uninformed.

But then again, he's fat also.

People, people, come back to reality.  I'm no McCain fan at all, repeat at all, but if this is John loosing his mind then my wife must be a mass murderer.  Does anyone here have a spouse, a boss, kids, neighbors, ever call your cable company, or BofA or Citibank?  I've gotten more attitude by just asking for directions.  He's a bit annoyed and that's all.  There are no headlines here.  I don't know why every blog I follow has this as a page 1 item.  

He did not flip out. May God. This is nothing compared to what we have seen of him in the past. This is a non-story. Seriously people, I know you want to win, but please, get a hold of your perspectives.