Oh the irony.

During the primary and well before, Joe Klein was one of the top purveyors of the virtues of so-called bi-partisanship, which really just means Democrats giving in to whatever Republicans want. For Joe Klein, this has meant the deification of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg and, yes, John McCain. The blogs have spent many a pixel trashing Klein for it, even giving him a pet name, Joke Line, and it was clear, a mutual contempt society had been born.

But then something happened. John McCain's campaign started to go off the rails and began to regularly betray anything honorable that may have once existed in the old McCain. And Joe Klein, in his capacity as blogger for Swampland, called McCain on it. In fact, Klein has issued some of the most scathing commentary about McCain during this election season. Take his last Swampland post, for example:

John McCain had a fabulously loony weekend, flipping out charges and attacks like a mud tornado. The truly remarkable thing about McCain's attacks, especially on Obama's economic policies, is that McCain, in each case, is "guilty" of supporting some version of the policies he's attacking:

1. He attacks Obama for increasing "welfare" by providing refundable tax credits--that is giving people the cash equivalent if they don't pay enough in income taxes to reap the full benefit of the credit--but McCain's own $5000 health insurance credit is also refundable.

2. He attacks Obama for spreading "socialism," but McCain supported the bailout that enabled the Bush Administration to partially nationalize the banking system last week. If that ain't a (very mild) form of socialism, I don't know what is.

3. He attacks Obama's tax plan as a form of "spreading the wealth"--the words Obama used when talking to Joe the Unlicensed Tax Dodger in Ohio--because Obama would reduce taxes on the middle class and pay for it by restoring Clinton-era marginal tax rates on the wealthy. And yet, McCain proudly voted for a major tax hike and wealth redistribution scheme in his early days in his early days in Congress.

So what does Klein get for speaking the truth on his blog? Access to John McCain's press plane DENIED.

From Politico:

Time columnist Joe Klein, who's been a forceful critic of the McCain campaign (and already said he's unwilling to accept a post-election apology), has found himself without a seat on the McCain or Palin planes the past four months.

In June, Klein was kept from boarding the McCain plane over what they said had been a security issue. More recently, when trying to fly on the Palin plane last week, Klein told Politico over e-mail that the campaign's response was he "couldn't be accommodated at this time."

"I've done nine presidential campaigns and this is the first time this has ever happened to me," Klein said. "I was even allowed--I won't say welcomed--on the Clinton plane in the summer of 1996 after I was revealed as the author of Primary Colors."

In the post, Michael Calderone and Joe Klein appear to give the McCain campaign the benefit of the doubt -- surely there must be a good reason for the mix up, right? Yep, there's a good reason all right:

UPDATE: Campaign spokesperson Michael Goldfarb responded that "we don't allow Daily Kos diarists on board either."

Haha. Classic. Joe Klein, after being slammed by bloggers for years for despising partisanship and equating the blogs with the coarsening of political discourse, has become one of us, at least in the McCain campaign's eyes. Well, welcome to the club, Joe.