After a long, distinguished career of talking the talk and then cowering like a whipped bitch caught with her nose in the trash, John “Mavericky McMaverickstain” McCain finally did something right.

Republicans’ seven-year quest to wipe out President Obama’s Affordable Care Act came to a crashing halt around 1:30 this morning, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) shockingly bucked his party and voted against a scaled-down repeal bill that emerged as the Senate’s last-ditch effort. It’s now clear that replacing Obamacare — or even repealing small parts of it — may be forever a pipe dream for President Trump and the GOP, whose deep divisions over the U.S. health-care system proved unbridgeable in the end.

He likely did it for the wrong reasons (providing cover for GOP colleagues who wanted the repeal to die but still have to face their yahoo bases back home), but these days I’ll take what I can get.

Through the years, Scholars & Rogues has been hard on McCain, with me leading the charge. For instance:

This is the McCain brand: Talk shit. Apply Chapstick. Drop to knees.

He’s always asked us to believe he was a moderate, a deal-maker, a principled line in the sand, a straight-talking, take no gump off nobody paragon of courage and morality. And when push comes to shove, he’s your puffed up, gutless brother-in-law who never met a fight he wouldn’t run from.

He’s like if Theon Greyjoy were a Republican.

In any case, I predicted that he’d die before he ever stepped up and stood behind his “convictions.” Last night he did. Sorta. As I say, at this stage, the right thing for the wrong reasons is a win.

Maybe his condition (brain cancer that has been characterized as “aggressive”) has him thinking about his life, and maybe he doesn’t like what he sees. Maybe he has, in some faint way, come to the same conclusions about himself that I have. (Hey, I said “maybe.” I said it three times.)

Or maybe he now knows he has nothing to lose and that set him free to fuck over a president who insulted him during the campaign. It could be as simple as payback. I don’t know and never will.

Whatever, there may be a lesson in here somewhere. Maybe we’d get better results if we only elected people who were terminally ill.