I was in D.C. Friday and away over the weekend, so I’m catching up.

Here’s my Friday Post column on McCain’s Reform Institute shenanigans:

As Sen. John McCain gears up for a prospective presidential run in 2008, he’s trying to put an ugly little incident behind him — one that makes him look like a flat-out hypocrite on his signature issue, campaign-finance reform.

If members of the national media are anything more than lapdogs for the war-hero, “maverick” senator, they’ll start asking some tough questions about a bogus little think tank in Alexandria, Va., called the Reform Institute.

…

McCain’s dealings are not something he or his speech-police compatriots would accept from anyone else in politics. Anonymous donations, in particular, are seen by such folks as utterly toxic.

Changing the window dressing is not enough. John McCain is the Reform Institute, and the Reform Institute is John McCain. Either he should bring it up to the standards he sets for everyone else, or he should get off the high horse he plans to ride into the White House three years from now.

The most important question I ask in my column is: Who is “Contributor No. 8″? This is an anonymous contributor to the Reform Institute — the Institute won’t even release the size of the donation.

You can read the Institute’s odd note to the IRS — explaining that the name of this donor is so sensitive the Institute can’t even include it on the organization’s 990, lest it leak out — in this PDF of the Reform Institute’s 2003 990. It’s on page 21.