On March 3, John McCain — in his continuing anti-pork crusade — mocked “$951,500 for the Oregon Solar Highway” as the #1 piece of pork in the omnibus spending bill.

Just four days earlier, he had produced a top-ten list. It’s easy enough to guess (from his track record of constant reversals on every single thing under the sun during his recent presidential campaign) that that list had a totally different #1. Funny thing is that the Oregon Solar Highway wasn’t even on that top-ten list.

It’s also easy enough to guess that anyone who cared to check what the Oregon Solar Highway project actually consists of came away impressed with the project, and consequently even more contemptuous of John McCain than they were going in:

The Oregon Solar Highway is “the nation’s first solar panel project on a major U.S. highway,” which seeks to use a row of solar panels about five feet wide and two football fields long to feed electricity directly into Portland General Electric’s systemwide grid. It is meant to “account for 28 percent of the energy needed to power lights that illuminate the highway’s sweeping interchange at night.”

It occurred to me this morning to check what proportion of the mainstream media who reported on this story actually bothered to point out that the project McCain was mocking is, in fact, praiseworthy.

Not at all easy to guess what I found.

Now, McCain mocked this project on Twitter on the afternoon of March 3. More than 36 hours later, a Google News search turned up precisely zero mainstream media stories about this.

These guys used to be in his pocket. The coverage they gave him, McCain was closer than family, hanging out with McCain was better than sex. And now every last one has just turned their back on him?

I would make ritual noises about how sad that is. Except that McCain has clearly brought this upon himself, through the stupid and sleazy guttersnipe presidential campaign he waged.

Nice to see that elections can have these kinds of consequences too.