John McCain got a helping hand Sunday from Brit Hume on Fox News. Although, in the end, I wonder whether Hume did him any favors.

Hume was opining about McCain’s error last week about how the Shiites in Iran were supposedly training terrorists for al-Qaida (a Sunni group) and sending them into Iraq. The error was so flagrant that even fellow warrior Joe Lieberman felt compelled to correct him. But McCain repeated this error in several venues, thereby grossly exaggerating the al-Qaida threat in Iraq (just as Bush and Cheney routinely do).

Of course, if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had gone to Iraq and uttered such a jaw-dropping inaccuracy, Fox News would be running the video on every talkfest. But Hume told his viewers that, since McCain did it, it was not such a big deal.

“The mistake,” Hume said, “raises not the question about his knowledgeability – we all kind of believe that he has that. The question perhaps is about his age, which is an issue … that he might have had kind of a senior moment there. And I think that’s unfortunate for him.”

So … it was really OK that McCain screwed up so badly on a fundamental piece of national-security info, because he was merely having a “senior moment.” This is a defense?

Scanning the landscape at week’s end:

Now that the Democratic do-over scenarios have evaporated in Florida and Michigan, I can summarize my reaction:

Good riddance.

It’s really quite simple. The Democratic National Committee, in its attempt to stop the extreme front-loading of the calendar, established rules barring those states from staging primaries in January. Both states were determined to break the rules anyway, by staging primaries in January. The DNC warned that the states would be stripped of their delegates if they broke the rules. The states ignored the threat and broke the rules. They were then stripped of their delegates.

Hillary Clinton claims that this “disenfranchisement” of Michigan will hurt the Democrats in the autumn campaign against John McCain, but that’s just spin from a seriously trailing candidate. Six months from now, the Democratic nominee (whoever it is) will be spending a lot of time in Michigan, talking about the kitchen-table economic issues that Michigan voters care about most, issues that typically favor the Democrats.

Meanwhile, what a huge relief it is to learn that Florida will not be conducting a do-over primary. It’s akin to getting the news that the lunatic distant cousin in your family will not be coming for Thanksgiving after all.