CNN reports:

Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator’s campaign last week for what one aide called “trashing” the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN. One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading “disinformation” about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials. “He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain’s campaign message,” said one of the aides.

Not that it would’ve mattered much in this atmosphere of economic uncertainty—and it certainly wouldn’t’ve mattered to more than a handful of DC people even in boom times—but I do wish John McCain had ditched this belligerent little man earlier during his campaign.

I saw Randy Scheunemann speak at two events and came away profoundly unimpressed each time. The man’s a shrill ideologue who, given his privileged position and long history of working with McCain, was probably responsible for the most unpalatable foreign policy positions articulated by the Republican side.

Here’s to hoping his career isn’t resurrected by a resurgent Palin in 2012.

I’ve always found it apt when the everyman supporters of a political movement are called “the base”. As a coastal elitist snob, I often heap scorn on the base elements of our society which also happen to be the bases of both parties—indeed, the bases of all successful parties in a democracy.

For a democracy to properly function, however, the base base must not be agitated with populism and demagoguery. If it is, ugliness ensues and democracy is threatened. Witness this WaPo report:

Worse, Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Sow the seeds of discord, reap the whirlwind. Something like that.