It's amazing how the Beltway politics/media merry-go-round feeds upon itself.

In just a few hours yesterday, the following vicious cycle occurred…

* In Monday morning's paper, The New York Times runs a story reporting on McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' consulting work for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which netted him $2 million.

* Davis and McCain spokesman Steve Schmidt hastily organize a conference call with political reporters, in which they accuse the Times of being "an organization that has made a decision to cast aside it's journalistic integrity to advocate for the defeat of John McCain."

* Blogger Ben Smith from Politico, who was in on the conference call, immediately writes a blog piece criticizing the McCain camp for several inaccurate statements made during the call.

* McCain spokesman Brian Rogers announces that Politico is also "in the tank" for Barack Obama.

* The New York Times writes an online news article about how the McCain camp "lashed out at The New York Times on Monday, accusing it of dropping its journalistic standards."

* Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, does an interview with Politico defending his paper.

* Hundreds of media sources, from The Wall Street Journal to The Atlantic to The Washington Post report on the brouhaha.

* Everyone takes a break and has lunch.

I'm not sure what happened after that because I got a really bad headache and had to lie down.

Unsure of who wrote the playbook for John McCain's increasingly negative campaign against Barack Obama? Well have you considered former Hillary Clinton strategist Mark Penn?

According to the upcoming issue of The Atlantic, Penn was pushing Clinton as far back as March 2007 to raise public doubts on Obama's "roots to basic American values and culture." Regarding Obama's virtues as a multicultural candidate, Penn opined, "Save it for 2050," adding…

"I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."

Sounds like Penn had been receiving e-mails intended for somebody's Jewish grandmother in South Florida. Or maybe he was the one sending them. Who knows.

And what's more American than stirring up racial tensions?

"If you believe that serious issues need to be raised then we have to raise them without continual hesitation and we should be pushing the envelope. Won't a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?

"Many people… believe under the surface that 20 years sitting there with Goddamn America would make him unelectable by itself."

It might very well have been a "game ender," but such a tape never showed up.

However, having no strategy past New Hampshire, blowing through money like MC Hammer and openly courting the George Wallace wing of the Democratic Party seemed to do the trick quite nicely.