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Bloggers have been all of this for months, if not years. But I've been waiting for a major national publication to pick up the story. It looks like no less than Time Magazine has decided to be the first.

Mr. Straight Talk Express? Turns out the man's a hypocrite. Who knew?

After staking his reputation on the moral high ground by speaking truth to power on issues ranging from deficits to torture, McCain is uniquely vulnerable to anything that hints of hypocrisy--even on questions that ordinary politicians would get a pass on. To have a shot at winning a presidential election these days, for instance, it is nearly a requirement that candidates opt out of the federal finance system, forgoing its matching funds because it's too difficult to mount a credible campaign within the law's spending caps. But that move, however pragmatic, would look bad coming from an author of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law.

Also, it's harder for McCain than most to explain away inconsistencies. How, for example, could a deficit hawk vote to make President Bush's tax credits permanent after opposing their passage in the first place as fiscally irresponsible? Or why, after declaring Jerry Falwell to be an agent of intolerance during the brutal 2000 primary campaign, did McCain deliver the commencement speech last May at Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia?

Such overtures might make inroads in a skeptical Republican base, but these shifts make some of his longtime allies worry. "A profile in courage can become a profile in unrestrained ambition," says former Reagan White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein, who was one of the few G.O.P. establishment figures to support McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. "He has to remember who his friends are and not spend his integrity on one-night stands with those who will never fully trust him."

Having spent all of 2000 sucking up to McCain, I suspect the media are going to do everything they can this time to tear him down. To be perfectly honest, that's fine by me. The man built his reputation on his "integrity," only to abandon that approach when it didn't win him the presidency. Whether he was lying then or now is irrelevant.