Weighing in at not quite 2 tons of fun, the McCain Girls are tearing up the YouTube charts and shattering a whole lot of eardrums. Are they hip? Do they make John McCain hip? The jury is still out on that.

And while the McCain Girls have racked up more than a half million views in just one week, they are still a good bit shy of the total number times people have watched John McCain sing that old Beach Boy's ditty. Combining the various clips and mash-ups of the ol' hipster singing "Bomb Iran," McCain has been viewed at least 5 million times. More than 1.1 million of those views were of his unedited clip. For my money, though, I prefer Mike Gravel's remake of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" to McCain's surf band homage:

Hugh Atkin is viderate. You and I are not (that is, unless you know how to use Final Cut Pro and have amassed an in-depth videobank of clips and allusions that you can manipulate as easily as typing this sentence). We've linked to his stuff before, but I'm writing this mash note because I think he deserves more attention here in the U.S. (his Australian countrymen already know how brilliant he can be).

Does the left have a monopoly on funny satire? Does Final Cut Pro only work on computers owned by progressives? Or is it something in the water? What makes some people "viderate" and others embarrassingly illiterate in what works with online video?