Now, how can you be a good winger if you didn’t even vote for Teh Man?

And so here, our controversy of the week begins over at the Huffington Post, where Arianna - former Republican Arianna - writes of how, at a dinner party at Candice Bergen’s Beverly Hills home in the fall of 2000, John McCain said, quite audibly, that he did not vote for Teh Decider, President Bush.

Now, you might think Arianna is just saying this, to plug a book. Which she does have out. But now we’ve got two other guests at the party - former West Wing actors Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff - saying they heard the same thing:

“McCain was just sort of going off on how much he disliked Bush and the horrible things that the Bush campaign had done to his family in South Carolina, and his exasperation with Bush about his ridiculous tax cuts and he really wanted to talk to him about it, but he said the guy doesn’t have the concentration, and you talk for 10 minutes and then the guy wants to talk about baseball,” Mr. Whitford said.

Another guest then asked Mr. McCain, Mr. Whitford recalled, whether he had voted for Mr. Bush. “And he put his finger in front of his mouth and mouthed, ‘No way,’ ” Mr. Whitford said.

And see, there was a time when this might have earned Sen. McCain brownie points - with the likes of me, anyway. But now, of course, McCain is his party’s standard-bearer; he may not be a total winger, but he has to play one on TV. And if there’s one thing the base won’t cotton to, it’s disloyalty; yes, Bush may well have been the most disastrous president in several generations, but unless you’ve been behind him every step of the way, you’re toast.

So of course McCain is denying everything. As he must.

But for me, the best part of the story is John McCain at a Beverly Hills soiree with Hollywood elite. Do you think he ate canapes? Drank white wine? If you’re John McCain, you’ve got to deny this as well; “No way did I have dinner in Beverly Hills. I was at a KFC in Canoga Park.”

Anything else would be elitist.