McCain May Not Have Helped Invent The Blackberry, But He Was Part Of The Team That Invented Banking Scandals And Bailouts

Is there a relationship to John McCain's Keating 5 Scandal, which led to the taxpayers losing $3.4 billion, and the current Wall Street meltdown? You bet there is! Crooks & Liars has the story. Both scandals are direct results of Greed, special interest's/political corruption and the arrogance of Power. And McCain was at the heart of both. Although his disgraceful role in the Keating 5 scandal was largely whitewashed and he got away with an admonishment, his role as the head of the Senate Banking Committee where he came down firmly against federal regulatory agencies on behalf of the special interests paying him off with millions and millions of dollars in political "donations," will be tougher to deny.

The new film, Third Term helps put McCain's relationship to his ethics shortcomings into perspective. David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch sums it up nicely: "Fast-forward twenty years to now, we have a huge mortgage crisis on our hands. It’s the result of years and years and years of a deregulatory approach that Senator McCain has supported."

He did not learn his lesson. The S&L collapse was a failure of adequate regulation, with the banks running wild, making dodgy investments with high risk-high reward margins. If that sounds familiar, it should... It’s the same thing that’s happening now, as banks fail, and as our housing market collapses. And the people responsible for this new crisis are the ones McCain has surrounded himself with, men like Phil Gramm and his banking lobbyists. He will offer the same kind of deregulatory policies that led to the banking collapse of the early ‘90s.

Take a look at this short clip from the movie, which puts the whole mess into perspective:



Just like he did before, at the time of his Keating 5 Scandal, McCain is desperate to blame everyone else and take no responsibility. That is the hallmark of his disgraceful career. McCain railing against the "Washington culture of lobbying and influence peddling," blaming this culture of the Wall Street crisis, and insisting that Obama is "square in the middle of it" is quintessential McCain, someone any colleague from the Senate, short of gay cypher Lindsey Graham and Holy Joe Lieberman-- both of whom have pinned their political futures to McCain's star-- will tell you is the least trustworthy, least believable, least honorable man in the U.S. Senate, regardless of political party.

Even the Wall Street Journal's notoriously right-wing editorial board is fed up with his devious campaign and is telling its readers that he "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street... McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. It's also un-Presidential... It wasn't very long ago that he blamed speculators on the long side for sky-high oil prices. Then oil prices fell. Now Mr. McCain wants voters to believe speculators are responsible for driving mismanaged financial companies to ruin. The irony is that this critique puts Mr. McCain in the same camp as some of the Wall Street CEOs who have led their firms so poorly. They also want someone (else) to blame... In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution."

This morning Bush and Obama were calling on the whole nation to put partisanship aside and come together to fight the common enemy. McCain, clearly sensing that he is the common enemy lashed out viciously and desperately with more false negative, Rovian TV commercials trying to blame Obama while spewing an endless regurgitation of lies and distortions.