Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The Los Angeles Times published a story today — on the front page above the fold — about the adultery of a presidential candidate that, if it had been about the Democrat, would likely have changed the dynamics of the 2008 presidential campaign — possibly even throwing the election to the other party.

Instead, the story is about John McCain, the Republican, and is therefore bound to be ignored by the rest of the mainstream press.

The only possible interest the story might generate in the corporate media — and in conservative circles, where McCain is already not particularly well-liked — stems from the fact that McCain’s extramarital affair with his current wife, Cindy, permanently ended his friendship with Ronald Reagan and, especially, his wife, Nancy, around the same time Reagan was running for president 30 years ago.

The Times article opens with the strained moments around Nancy Reagan’s tepid endorsement of McCain earlier this year:

The Times reports that the Reagans sided completely with McCain’s first wife in the divorce. They assisted her in finding a new home in Southern California and then helped her find a new career after Reagan became president.

In his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For, McCain himself acknowledged the termination of the Reagan’s friendship. “My divorce from Carol,” he wrote, “whom the Reagans loved, caused a change in our relationship. Nancy … was particularly upset with me and treated me on the few occasions we encountered each other after I came to Congress with a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear. I had, of course, deserved the change in our relationship.”

The Times report today also casts doubt on McCain’s oft-repeated story that he waited a decent interval after leaving Carol before he began his affair with Cindy Hensley:

While McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Carol kept their family — their daughter and her two sons by a previous marriage whom McCain adopted — together and became an active member of the POW movement.

On Christmas Eve 1969, however, Carol McCain suffered devastating injuries in a single car accident. The Times article says she “she broke both legs, an arm and her pelvis. She was operated on a dozen times, and in the treatment she lost about five inches in height.”

When McCain returned from Vietnam, he told friends that Carol was no longer the woman he married, according to the Times. That would have been about 1973, just six years before he began his affair with Cindy Hensley.

One interesting side note is that McCain’s divorce attorney was George E. “Bud” Day, a fellow POW who was a key player in the Swiftboating of McCain’s former friend, John Kerry, in the 2004 campaign. Bud Day, who was closely associated with a group that has become synonymous with lying about an opponent’s record, now heads up McCain’s so-called Truth Squad.

Just imagine the firestorm we’d be enduring if Barack Obama were the subject of a story that had any of these elements: an extramarital affair, lying on the record about the timing of the affair and an estrangement from a political icon caused by the affair.

Obama — or any Democrat — would be hounded by the media and the rightwing noise machine to a degree that would very likely make his chances of winning in November somewhere between slim and none.

By contrast, it is as equally a dead certainty there will be nothing in the news about McCain’s adultery, sex lies and estrangement from the Reagans after today — not even when McCain campaigns in California for a constitutional amendment that supposedly protects marriage — not from adultery, the real threat to marriage — but from gay people seeking equal rights.