"I've lived here for at least 10 years and before that about every third duty I was in either Arlington or Alexandria, up in communist country," Joe McCain said at an event in Loudon [sic] County, Va.

It's a curious insult to level at a part of the country where McCain himself has chosen to live, in one of his seven homes. Even more so considering that he chooses to live in Crystal City, the one part of Arlington that fails to improve on the aesthetics of Stalin-era Soviet architecture. Nevertheless, Joe McCain has a point: the speculation that Barack Obama has shot at turning the Commonwealth of Virginia from red to blue -- which is presumably, in Joe McCain's estimation, a different shade of Red -- would not find its fuel were it not for the reliably Democratic-tilting Arlington and Alexandria.