He said what?

To who?

While most of the jabber about John McCain's appearance before the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department has focused on his threat to take a hike when heckled, this is the bit that struck me the hardest…

McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.

Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain's job offer.

"I'll take it!" one man shouted.

McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. "You can't do it, my friends."

Who can't do what? Does this man have any idea who he's talking to? What he's talking about?

Has this son of privilege, who has lived his entire life at the federal tit, ever packed shingles up a ladder in the beating sun? Crawled into a sewer with a wrench and a flashlight? Hefted a wheelbarrow full of mortar across a job site? Swung a goddamn hammer for any reason more serious than hanging a picture?

The men and women in that audience have, typically for a fraction of $50 an hour (which doubtless doesn't sound like much to John McCain) for season after season, year after backbreaking year.

John McCain's outspoken contempt for American working men and women is just one more way in which he's a typical Republican. I guess he deserves a 'straight talk' point or two for telling the Building Trades folks just how little he thinks of them to their face, but he loses whatever shreds of his carefully cultivated image as a maverick might have remained.

Update: Tim Tagaris does the math...