Three belly laughs at week's end:

The McCain campaign is whining about the media. That is not a misprint. John McCain, of all people, a politician who for years has been treated as a demigod by the Washington press corps - and who, in fact, has enjoyed yet another easy ride during the '08 campaign - is grousing, via his spokeswoman, about all the media attention that Barack Obama will receive during his impending overseas trip.

Jill Hazelbaker said the other day, "It certainly hasn't escaped us that the three network newscasts will originate from stops on Obama's trip." The implication, of course, is that McCain won't get nearly the same attention while Obama is abroad.

Regarding that lament, I will now quote actor Steve Buscemi, who, in the role of Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, rubbed his thumb against his index finger and said, "Do you know what this is? It's the world's smallest violin." It's tough to pluck the strings of sympathy for McCain, since, in the first place, he made such a big issue about Obama's lack of overseas travel. He made that a campaign issue, and banged away at it for weeks. But now that Obama is actually going - and drawing a huge media contingent, for solid newsworthy reasons that I will shortly explain - he doesn't like that, either. The line now is that Obama's trip is merely a "campaign rally" and "photo op." And since the McCain camp is now stuck with the prospect that Obama will draw enormous crowds at many of his stops - thereby telegraphing to many Americans how nice it might be to again have a president who is popular abroad - the pre-buttal strategy is to complain in advance that the media is acting as Obama's enabler.

And that's our first belly laugh today, because few Washington politicians have been coddled by the media as McCain has. I won't recite chapter and verse about why this is so, or catalogue how an ardent career conservative has somehow attained the journalistic shorthand of "maverick," since I have covered that ground before. (OK, just one example: When McCain started flip-flopping in 2006 by pandering to the GOP's right wing, a Washington Post columnist excused his actions by writing, "A successful campaign almost requires some fibbing.")

But, just to give you a flavor of the dominant Washington attitude, consider this recently-published dispatch from a Time magazine correspondent. You might need anti-nausea medicine by the time you finish reading: "Here's one thing you need to know about John McCain. He's always been the coolest kid in school....When he sits in the back of his campaign bus, we reporters gather like kids in the cafeteria huddling around the star quarterback. We ask him tough questions, and we try to make him slip up, but almost inevitably we come around to admiring him....He is, to put it simply, cooler than us."

And lately the kids in the cafeteria have done an effective job protecting the quarterback. For instance, you may remember the incident last week, when McCain declared at an event that the 73-year-old structure of the popular Social Security program, whereby current young workers pay taxes to support the current generation of retirees, is actually, in his words, "an absolute disgrace." Seven newspapers, including The Washington Post, covered the event - and all failed to mention McCain's comment in their reports. The cable and network news shows barely ran the video of the comment. And even though McCain actually repeated his comments, albeit in softer language, in a CNN interview, the Washington press corps caught up with the story by making excuses for him. A Time magazine writer said that McCain had merely been "misspeaking," and a Washington Post reporter insisted in an online chat that McCain had probably  not intended to offer such a sweeping criticism of the program itself.

Nor have I seen heavy mainstream media scrutiny of McCain's repeated foreign affairs stumblings: his multiple confusions of the Sunni and the Shia; his confusion of Somalia and the Sudan; his multiple references to "Czechoslovokia," a country that ceased to exist in 1993; his delusional claim that the U.S. has "drawn down to pre-surge levels" in Iraq; his recent reference to Prime Minister Putin of Russia as "President Putin of Germany." Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing much Washington press corps discussion of whether McCain is perhaps not as sharp on the nuances of foreign affairs as he claims to be - or, at the very least, whether he is not as mentally sharp as a president ideally should be.

Anyway, with respect to the McCain camp's whine about all the press that Obama will generate while abroad: The journalistic judgment is easy to explain. It's Obama's first national security trip as a candidate, his first trip to a war zone. He's new to the national scene. And, more broadly, he's a new kind of candidate, an historic first. He garnered more spring coverage than McCain because his protracted contest with Hillary Clinton was also an historic first. The press does indeed have a bias. It favors what is new, and it favors firsts.

And when a campaign starts grousing about the press, it is a sign of political weakness. In the case of the McCain campaign, it reflects a basic fear that its candidate will lose.

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Bathroom humor from C-Span.

Our second belly laugh comes courtesy of Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho. Last time we saw him, he was taking a wide stance in a Minneapolis airport bathroom stall, rubbing against the foot of an undercover cop. His subsequent guilty plea in a sex sting, and his insistence on staying in the U.S. Senate, have embarrassed the party of "family values," but at least he was keeping a low profile...

Until yesterday, apparently, when he showed up on the Senate floor to argue for U.S. energy independence. He did OK for awhile - until he declared that we shouldn't allow Nigeria or Saudi Arabia or Iran to "jerk us around by the gas nozzle."

Sounds to me like he needs a few sessions with Dr. Freud.

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And if you can't muster a smile for those two items, try this one. And have a good weekend.