Ok, it’s a good one this morning -

Eerie McCain, weird Bill

Let me warn you that today’s topics are not substantive. We’re not going to extend health insurance or lower oil prices today.

We’re going to talk style and sex. Criticize if you must. Read if you please.

Anyway, the way to extend health insurance is to vote Democratic and the way to lower oil prices is to consume less. What can you say after you’ve said that? Let’s move on.

There is John McCain’s creepy forced smile. Seriously. It’s Topic A.

He’ll be tooling along in a speech, reading from the TelePrompTer, when, all of a sudden, he’ll stop and implant this clumsy and hideous lip-and-tooth thing. He apparently is trying to oblige image handlers who have instructed him that he needs to convey, in case it is not otherwise evident, that he has just presented humor or cleverness.

It’s like those letters I got as a child from my sweet and now-departed granny and aunt. They’d write something, then pen “ha.”

I first saw this horror in an early Republican presidential debate when McCain declared that he would follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell. Then he paused long enough to gather up this supposed smile, then bared it.

It was positively eerie.