Is he fucking crazy?

The most astute observation on John McCain's effort to postpone the debate comes from, of all people, David Letterman:

You don't suspend your campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves. I think someone's putting something in his metamucil."
"He can't run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?

What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!

Letterman made the statement after learning, mid-taping, that McCain had canceled his previously scheduled appearance on the show to, according to McCain's people, return to DC to help deal with the financial crisis. However, Letterman was well aware that McCain was at that moment just a few blocks away, being interviewed by Katie Couric.

So, what exactly is the sound made by an imploding presidential campaign? We're about to find out.

Update 7:11pm PDT: Go here for more about the canceled Letterman/McCain interview

Update 2 9:40pm PDT: Here's the video:

Is this the cultural touchstone moment that signifies the "cratering" of the McCain campaign's credibility with the American electorate? Some have already compared it to Cronkite's Tet Offensive editorial questioning the US's continued prosecution of the war in Vietnam.

Letterman, of course, is not the newsman that Cronkite was and TV audiences are segmented in a way that they never were back in 1968. But, somewhere in the neighborhood of four million will view Letterman's observation on TV; millions more are likely to see it on YouTube.

Like Cronkite's 1968 reckoning of the war in Vietnam, Letterman's belittling of the McCain campaign echoes a sentiment that is already growing by the day with the media and in the political zeitgeist as a whole. Examples abound from the media's loss of patience with Sarah Palin's dodging of their questions to conservative intellectual icon George Will's disgusted critique of McCain's erratic and needlessly risky response to the pressures of both real world events and the campaign itself. Short of some gigantic error by Obama in the debates (if those debates happen at all), or some series of events that turns the whole campaign on its head, Peggy Noonan will have nailed when back at the beginning of the Republican convention, she said "it's over!" Sarah Palin may well have turned out to be the beginning of the end.