Set aside the he-said, she-said aspect to the McCain-didn't-vote-for-Bush-in-2000 story for a second to savor the flawless irony of Arianna Huffington telling the New York Times that "she chose to speak out now because she felt Mr. McCain had abandoned his principles."

This is a woman who jettisoned her principles and raced across the ideological spectrum from one extreme to the other faster than a six-legged cheetah.

I have to recall, as I did a few years ago when she ran for Governor of California, Ed Rollins' searing description of Arianna from his 1996 memoir, "Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms," where he recounted his experience managing Michael Huffington's 1994 Senate run:

Since early July, I'd been working for two of the most unprincipled political creatures I'd ever encountered. One was such a complete cipher he gave empty suits a bad name. But his wife was even worse - a domineering Greek Rasputin determined to ride her husband's wealth to political glory at any cost....

Arianna Huffington had charmed me out of my socks to get me to manage her husband's campaign. But in a few short months, I'd come to realize that she was the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I'd met in thirty years in national politics - not to mention that she sometimes seemed truly pathological.

You have to hand it to her, though, the ambition and the transformation have paid off handsomely. The further left Arianna has gone, the more success she's had (in a way not totally dissimilar from Ann Coulter on the right), and in just a few short years she's become a doyenne of progressives.