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McCain on Alito: A Romney Operation?

Jim Geraghty mulls the flap over Senator John McCain’s alleged statement expressing doubt as to hwther he would have nominated Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court:

One other… odd thing about the Fund column — and I don’t want this to be interpreted as questioning Fund’s reporting, because he’s a pro and I trust him. But if a potential GOP presidential nominee said that he was kind of iffy on Alito, one of the few true clear-cut victories for conservatism in recent years, wouldn’t you think that by the time McCain finished the following sentence, everyone in the audience would have already typed into their Blackberries, “U WON’T BELIEVE WHAT McC JUST SAID” and begun preparing their furious denunciations? Wouldn’t the conservatives who heard it be knocking people over in order to get in front of a camera to rip McCain for saying that? Or was this some odd crowd of conservatives who thought Alito was crassly vocal in his conservatism?

Flip side — if you look at McCain’s statements yesterday, you’ll notice he and his campaign are careful to not come out and say, “Fund and/or his sources are damn liars.” This is a stunningly damaging quote, with little detail on where and when it was said, stuck in the middle of a story about how McCain can warm his relationship with the right, coming the day before the primary that could make McCain the clear frontrunner and the guy in the driver’s seat for Super Tuesday. If Fund’s quote is wrong, isn’t there a strange lack of outrage from McCain?

UPDATE: A couple readers think this is setting up a Catch-22, where I’m finding McCain’s response strangely muted, while over in the Corner some posters talk about McCain’s temper. All I’m saying is that McCain either said it or he didn’t; if he didn’t say it — or if there was some sort of wildly different context to the quote — then somebody lied to John Fund, and somebody made sure a really damaging lie hit the news world 24 hours before the Florida primary. An act like that should generate some outrage.

If “somebody lied to John Fund,” who benefits? Obviously, Mitt Romney. Perhaps the whole thing is the latest dirty trick from the Romney campaign.