It’s always flattering when the national media takes hold . . .

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, June 29, 2008 | 2 a.m.

It’s always flattering when the national media takes hold of something you have written. But I never would have guessed that the last thing Sen. John McCain said in an interview last week would become fodder for national media types. After I sardonically asked McCain whether he is running away from Jim Gibbons as fast as he is sprinting from George W. Bush, McCain chuckled and retorted, “And I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago.” It was an appropriate response to a loaded question but bloggers and others went berserk — making it seem as if he was joking about wife-beating when he had merely used a fairly common idiom. It wasn’t exactly fair to McCain. But, hey, it got me on Drudge!