Talking Points Memo digs deep into a report issued by Campaign Money Watch last week, and finds that soon after John McCain reversed his decision on offshore drilling, multiple executives or family members of executives of the Hess oil company gave John McCain whopping contributions:

Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

Nine of these contributions, seven from Hess executives and two from members of the Hess family, came on the same day, June 24th, the records show. The total collected in the wake of McCain's reversal for the fund, called McCain Victory 2008, from Hess execs and family is $285,000.

McCain reversed his position on June 16th. The Hess contributions were made on the 24th.

And the Hess contributions are only one segment of a much larger deluge of Oil money to McCain:

Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month -- three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban -- compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

There's not any disguising the fact that McCain benefited tremendously from reversing his position on the federal offshore drilling ban - a strategy that is purely political and yields almost no practical improvement for our current energy situation.

Update [2008-8-4 14:25:19 by Jonathan Singer]: It's apparently not just executives giving tens of thousands of dollars -- it's lower level employees, too.