Is the half-hidden message of the 2006 campaign season that in the presidential showdown in 2008 we'll have Senator John McCain running as both a Republican and a Democrat? It would certainly sweep away any remaining doubts that there is any difference between the two major parties. And maybe it would open up some space for outside challengers, assuming all vociferous opponents have not by that time been arrested and stuck behind barbed wire in an internment camp.

What candidate would be more appropriate as the next Commander in Chief than the mad ex-POW who now serves as Arizona's senior senator? McCain, don't forget, was under consideration by his senatorial colleague Democrat John Kerry to be his running mate in 2004 before Kerry picked John Edwards, whose prime distinction is that he is married to Elizabeth Edwards, the only Democrat I've seen in recent times to display any of the qualities one might hope for in a Democratic presidential nominee.

McCain is obviously aware of his impending responsibilities as the fusion candidate. As Congress prepared its craven assent to President Bush's destruction of habeas corpus with the Military Commissions Act, he was one of three Republican senators who raised a bleat of protest. True, as is always the case with McCain, it was a very brief bleat, but as against the complaisance of Democrats like Joe Biden (who chortled that the Democrats would be happy to sit on the sidelines as the Constitution thumped into the trash bin) this counts as a lion's roar.

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