In an attempt to make up for skipping out on Letterman a couple weeks ago, John McCain finally appeared on the show last night. BARELY! From the AP:

Not willing to risk the wrath of Letterman again, the Republican presidential candidate rented a helicopter to fly to New York after a weather delay grounded his campaign airplane in Philadelphia.

Whoa. Rented a helicopter? That is intense. You can see the flop butter dripping off of McCain’s muffin-face. I am not one of these ELITE LIBERALS who partakes in “gotcha” bloggerism, but there is something remarkable, in the strictest definition of that word: worth remarking, about a panicky John McCain renting a helicopter to ensure that he doesn’t miss his Letterman interview and also this. Whoopsie. Looks like he was grounded by a fun delay!

McCain’s Letterman appearance after the jump.

Well, OK! He seems light-hearted and capable of laughing at himself, which is a pleasant contrast to the past few weeks. But maybe someone should tell him to cool it with the drive-by shooting metaphors. Because of how YIKES. Oh, and the whole domestic wiretapping thing is less of a punchline in a riff about catching Osama Bin Laden and more of an infringement on our basic civil liberties by an over-zealous executive branch. Not to mention that it seems difficult to balance on the rhetorical tight rope of using your story as a Vietnam POW as both the deeply serious, singular defining moment of your character, and also a throwaway joke about the “torture” of silly questions. Wanh wanh wanh. But otherwise, PERFECT.

UPDATE: The stuff about Ayers is pretty great, if you think watching someone’s brain break is “great.”