Guest-blogger: Greg Wythe

Your intrepid blogger, Charles Kuffner, is literally adrift at sea this weekend. In his absence (of the physical sort), he's turned the keys over to others like myself (which may well represent an absence of good judgment).

With that, it seems only appropriate to mention the recent McCain bout of "Renounce and Reject" with his own pastor problems. Note the plural.

» NYT: McCain Cuts Ties to Pastors Whose Talks Drew Fire (Neela Banerjee, Michael Luo)

Senator John McCain on Thursday rejected the endorsements of two prominent evangelical ministers whose backing he had sought to shore up his credentials with religious conservatives.

Mr. McCain repudiated the Rev. John C. Hagee, a televangelist, after a watchdog group released a recording of a sermon in which Mr. Hagee said Hitler and the Holocaust had been part of God's plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive them to Palestine.

Later in the day, he also rejected the endorsement of the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio, whose anti-Muslim sermons were broadcast on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday.

Controversy has dogged the Hagee endorsement since Mr. McCain announced it at a February news conference, and just last week Mr. Hagee issued a letter expressing regret for "any comments that Catholics have found hurtful."

I'm not sure there was a win in this anywhere for McCain, so his best bet may very well have been to dump the duo over a holiday weekend, along with his medical records and the fact that he's actually considering Mitt Romney for the VP spot. Some things, you just have to get over and done with.

Likewise, I'm not certain that this does away with Obama's own issues. Not because there's a some sort of difference in Obama having been in Jeremiah Wright's church for two decades and all John McCain did was flip-flop on that whole "agents of intolerance" thing and crawl according to the whims of Falwell, Hagee, and Parsley. It's just that I think the Obama/Wright side of this cuts into another divide altogether - namely race and the incorrect suspicion that Obama might be Muslim even though he says he's Christian.

For McCain's sake, he loses if he sticks with his once-prized endorsees and he loses if he demonstrates his complete lack of knowledge about treading the political church circuit. That might just be the type of decision set he's going to get used to for the rest of the campaign.

What's most troubling is a point that Kevin Drum makes, however. It wasn't the airing of whacknuttery on the part of Parsley (70 days ago, in this case) and Hagee that seemed to trouble McCain. It was merely the fact that it was getting run by the MSM. What that says about McCain may be the most damaging - that as long as he can get away with coddling the most rightwing elements of his party without any attention being paid to it, there's no price too steep that he's willing to pay for the White House. It ought to make for a very entertaining campaign season, if nothing else.