by Marc Cooper [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

The Republican Right is already howling over the bombshell dropped by The New York Times on John McCain, the GOP's all-but-official nominee. But they've got it backwards. The Times, in fact, couldn't have found a moment more favorable for Johnny Mack to let this fearsome cat out of the bag. To say that if the Times had published its expose when it first had the story in December it would have changed the dynamic of the GOP race is perhaps the understatement of the decade. If it had come out two months ago, McCain would have been reduced to a political asterisk, a footnote alongside Tommy Thompson and Tommy Tancredo.