Conservative blogger Robert Stacy McCain has probably been covering the Herman Cain campaign longer than anybody. And amid calls for his ouster, McCain scored an interview with Cain’s controversial chief of staff Mark Block.

Here’s an excerpt:

BLOCK: You know, Stacy, and I’m not blowing smoke up your ass –- no pun intended — but you’re one of the few that get that this is a non-traditional campaign.

Does Block make mistakes? Of course! You know, one of the reasons is we don’t have an army of researchers and analysts telling us what we can and cannot say and how to say it, OK? I don’t have a whole slew of lawyers that I go to and say, ‘You know what, because I say this thing about this kid that works for Politico and his mother, double-check the facts.’ I get handed a piece of paper and it says that he works at Politico, they broke the story, same last name of this woman, connect the dots — I was wrong! I admitted I was wrong, all right?

Now, with all of those faults, though, Stacy, we run a million miles an hour. And you know what? We make mistakes. But they can’t catch us.

RSM: Well, you know, I defended the ‘Blame Perry’ move as strategic genius. And whether or not it was intentional or not, you know, even your mistakes help you.

BLOCK: No, no — I will not back off of the Perry thing, Stacy. I will say that I was wrong on the kid that worked for Politico, because we didn’t have our facts straight. I’m not backing off on the Perry thing. I backed off on the guy [consultant Curt Anderson], because he came out and said that it wasn’t him. But I’m still not backing off that the pot wasn’t stirred by the Perry folks.

RSM: Well, between you and me and the fencepost [discussion involving confidential sources, redacted] and we’ll never know where this shit came from, except that my hunch from the get-go was Perry. But if it was the Obama people, so what? If it was Romney, so what? You know, that doesn’t matter, really.

BLOCK: Yeah, you know what? It’ll probably be like Deep Throat. We probably won’t know for 25 years where the whole Politico thing came from.

Read the whole thing here.