Well, the plot thickens: Rich Lowry just talked to another McCain senior staffer -- Steve Schmidt -- who had some terse comments about the piece, including:
"It's a deliberate strategy by the Obama campaign to try to rule issues in-bounds and out-of-bounds and try to rule out-of-bounds every issue where he's vulnerable. They hope the media will abet them, and they have every reason to be optimistic," in light of the Newsweek story. Finally, he said of the story, "For everyone who works in the profession of journalism, it should make them cringe—it's an embarrassment."