McCain and Keating Five Scandal Revisited-- McCain Should Have Gone To Prison

When most people talk about the startling similarities between Bush and McCain, they're usually referring to the corporate-friendly policy agenda the two share, domestically and internationally. But there's another aspect that has long bothered me-- the ne'er-do-well lives they've both led. Both have failed upwards, primarily due to family connections. Both live in the lap of luxury though neither ever earned any substantial money at all-- and both have twisted, out-of-touch views of what it means to be middle class in America, a middle class each has diminished with his ideologically-driven policies. Everything that Bush ever touched turned to shit but he giggled and drank and snorted-- and cheated and lied and blustered-- his way into the presidency. McCain has been, if anything, even more of a screw-up and he would now like to get his hands on a 14th house, the White House.

McCain's biggest achievement in life was to be a complete and dismal failure in the Navy, impress every superior officer he ever served under as utterly unfit, and then get shot down and spend the war in prison. Every time he gets in a tight corner, he screeches that he was tortured-- for America and people let him slide. That's how he was elected to the House; it's how he's managed to worm out of every crisis since then, and it's even how his campaign responded yesterday when he wound up telling a reporter he didn't know how many houses he owns. (McCain surrogate Sean Hannity used the same argument last week to claim that although John Edwards' adultery was somehow a bad reflection on Barack Obama, John McCain's adulterous lifestyle must be forgiven because he was, after all, tortured for the country in Vietnam.) I guess that's also why the mass media never mentions that McCain-- aside from having between 7-13 houses (who knows; his staff can't figured it out either)-- pays his butlers and maids $270,000 a year. What do you pay your butlers and maids? Do you know how many houses you own?

As we saw yesterday, CNN has been running a feature called McCain Revealed. Not all that much was revealed-- other than the fact that adultery wasn't as much something that happened to him once as it was a lifestyle-- and that he was a crook who unjustly escaped prison for his shenanigans with nortorious bank swindler/close associate Charles Keating. Please take three and a half minutes to watch this CNN report and then ask yourself if you can trust John McCain to be president (of the United States):