Wall Street Journal column: “Is John McCain stupid?”

That’s the headline of Daniel Henninger’s latest Wonder Land column at WSJ, and all in all it’s less damning than the opening line: "Is John McCain losing it?"

Henninger continues:

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security "everything’s on the table," which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t."

This isn’t a flip-flop. It’s a sex-change operation.

He got back to the subject Tuesday in Reno, Nev. Reporters asked about the Sunday tax comments. Mr. McCain replied, "The worst thing you could do is raise people’s payroll taxes, my God!" Then he was asked about working with Democrats to fix Social Security, and he repeated, "everything has to be on the table." But how can . . .? Oh never mind.

McCain is justly renowned among his enemies for his many self-reversals on matters of policy; Steve Benen at Carpetbagger Report maintains a swell list of them that’s already more than 70 entries long. But blatant self-contradiction in the course of a single interview is something else again. There are mounting circumstantial signs that McCain is either a) the most overrated political practitioner in the world or b) suffering from cognitive impairment of some sort.

A few weeks back, when McCain told a Pittsburgh reporter his famous yarn about flouting his North Vietnamese captors by reciting the names of the Green Bay Packers’ linemen, he substituted the Steelers for the Packers. At time, I was inclined to chalk it up to McCain’s failure to appreciate that a wired world means you can no longer change up your boilerplate stories from town to town. But what if McCain wasn’t lying, just befuddled — as he clearly is concerning the history of the Iraq War and the geography of the Middle East? It’s not as if no one has made an issue of his nonstop gaffes; Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei of Politico — two reporters as thoroughly DC-establishment in outlook as they come — wrote a lengthy piece about them last week. (The TV blatherers are something else entirely; they’re perfectly happy to do whatever it takes to keep McCain cogent-seeming, as CBS proved last week when it frantically applied editing room CPR to a dead-on-arrival McCain interview.)

McCain’s people are apparently unable to stanch the wound that is McCain’s mouth, so it looks like they’re deep-sixing him to the greatest extent possible. from John Aravosis of Americablog points to a Rolling Stone campaign story not published online, "The No-Talk Express," in which reporters and other entourage members comment on McCain’s withdrawal from daily contact with reporters and his extremely modest appearance schedule.

There’s also this, from last weekend’s McCain appearance on ABC’s This Week.

Jed Report: Who said “timetable”? (:10)