'When a presidential campaign calls up and offers you a job you take it'

So says the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, talking about his six months on the John McCain campaign. I profoundly disagree -- I don't like the Beltway revolving door between politics and media, even ideological media -- but I don't want to argue about that. Some highlights from Goldfarb's interview with Columbia Journalism Review:

I thought from the beginning that we would lose.

Well, duh. I said so after Super Tuesday: "McCain is not a conservative, he will lose in November . . ."

I am not convinced that Sarah Palin hurt the campaign. People think that this decision was made in some kind of vacuum. I'm not convinced that a McCain/Romney ticket would have outperformed a McCain/Palin. Well, maybe if we'd done Lieberman we would have been down fifteen points after the convention instead of up four. I'm not convinced that Palin, even with all her weaknesses, wasn't the most plausible ticket you could have put forward this year.

Well, any ticket headed by John McCain was in deep trouble, no matter who the running mate was. And McCain cut his own throat with his bailout stunt, so any attempt to shift blame to Palin is scapegoating, period. The fact that McCain even considered putting Lieberman on the ticket illustrates how this year's defeat is 100% McCain's fault.

Lots more good stuff in the interview, including Goldfarb's denunciation of the anti-Palin leakers inside the campaign. He ought to denounce them by name, because they deserve to be persona non grata henceforth.