From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The big media story this week concerns an erstwhile media darling.

Can he guess? One candidate voted against the Bush tax cuts, both times, and pushed more

restrictions on gun owner's rights. The same candidate joined Ted Kennedy to sponsor Amnesty for

illegals. Hillary Clinton? No. John McCain. John McCain, surprisingly liberal. Arizona Senator John McCain once revered

and then reviled by political pundits when he pandered to Pat Robertson, whom he once likened to

Lewis Farrakhan, mocked by TV pundits and the op-ed page of the New York Times when his

Straight Talk Express blew out all its tires last summer is currently riding a wave that could lead to the Republican nomination.

But now he confronts the fiercest, most relentless enemy of his life, not counting the Viet Cong.

No, not Mitt or Hillary or Bill or even Carl.

They're pikers compared to the legions of Rush.

Limbaugh invades against him hour after hour.

So the McCain camp is doing its best to say that private sector business experience is irrelevant.

Take a bathroom break. Go out to lunch. You won't miss anything.

He is not the choice of conservatives as opposed to the choice of a Republican establishment.

But the Republican establishment is no defense against the on-rush.

He has curtailed free political speech. It was called McCain-Feingold.

He opposed tax cuts, one of only a few Republicans, to do so.

We took that last clip from Thursday's O'Reilly Factor on Fox News,

where former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum attacked McCain,

and conservative WABC radio talk show host Monica Crowley defended him, sort of.

He's bad on illegal immigration, bad on the Bush tax cuts, bad on anti-torture legislation,

...