PANDER BEAR McCAIN

John McCain, not content to limit this month's shameless pandering to the far right to a speech before the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute, is planning on Sunday to

speak in favor of abstinence-only education at the Carolina Pregnancy Center's Life in the City event at Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium.

Yes, because the young, single John McCain was such a model of purity and traditional morality as a young, single man at Annapolis:

He proved to be a natural leader, his magnetic personality making him the unofficial trail boss for a lusty band of carousers and partygoers known as the Bad Bunch.... [Chuck] Larson, an ex-officio member of the Bad Bunch, was McCain's closest friend at the Academy and for some years after.... They shared a sense of the absurd and an eye for the ladies. Larson, though, was cautious.... McCain didn't know what the word meant. As one classmate put it, being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck.

And, of course, his later life also wasn't exactly a model of virtue as fundamentalist Christians define it:

McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure.

The event on Sunday is "free for high school juniors and seniors." I hope a couple show up and ask him if he waited until marriage. Either time.

(Via Feministing.)