Shhhh! John McCain is making sense.

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the virtual earth. I haven't even been moping around because of Edwards' departure from the race. I was going to write up another encomium yesterday, but the blogs were so flooded with totally sweet odes to his campaign that I didn't feel the need to chime in.

Plus, it's been a really busy week. Which I never enjoy too much when it involves work and doing my taxes and stuff. Yes! I filed my returns in January! And it's possibly the first time-- ever-- that I didn't lazily file for an extension.

Moving on. The big thing about McCain's candidacy that baffles me, and pretty much every other rational person who follows politics, is why he's earned so much contempt from the right. In a lot of ways, he's the most conservative guy in the race. From this tidbit, though, it appears that the major complaint against McCain is that he's not a dyed-in-the-wool plutocrat.

When the Wall Street Journal reports that Republicans are in danger of losing support in the Florida Panhandle, you know trouble is brewing for the GOP. How the World Works spent its high school years in northern Florida, and the Panhandle is as rock-ribbed a slice of conservative deep South as you will find in either adjoining Alabama or Mississippi.

"A toxic brew of economic anxiety, a deepening housing slump, skyrocketing home insurance, strained schools and the lingering effects of recent hurricanes have spawned a gloomy mood in Florida," writes the Journal's Corey Dade.

But do Republican opinion-makers understand this? Watching the bloggers at the National Review's "The Corner" during Wednesday's Republican debate, you couldn't ignore the feeling that the right-wing elite simply don't understand the mess they're in, or why Sen. John McCain has been winning primaries.

Witness one representative comment:

Yeah, Senator, That's the Problem [Andy McCarthy]

McCain: "There are some greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished."

Is he our guy, or what?

Trust me, the sarcasm there is so thick you couldn't push through it in a turbo-powered Humvee.

For the despairing folks at the National Review, McCain's threat to punish the greedy is proof of his GOP-values-betraying pro-big government proclivities.

Here's hoping he keeps reminding people about his wacko foreign policy ideas and total ignorance of matters economic.