Shorter McCain On Keating

5:14 pm EST October 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Never mind what I said before, it was a smear job, I did nothing wrong. Maverick!

Nearly 20 years of John McCain’s contrition over his role in a 1980s banking scandal vanished this week in 17 minutes and 30 seconds.

It took that long for John Dowd, McCain’s lawyer in the Keating Five investigation, to make the mea culpas disappear in a telephone conference call with reporters.

Dowd said Monday the Arizona senator, now the Republican presidential nominee, was the victim of “a classic political smear job” and a “cheap shot” by Democrats who investigated him. The lawyer said the Democratic chairman of the Senate ethics committee during the investigation was a “stooge” of his leadership.

Topic:

Related Posts

«
»

4 Responses to “Shorter McCain On Keating”

  1. PG says:
    October 7, 2008 at 6:34 pm

    I love this: McCain is planning to lead the United States, but apparently he can’t keep his lawyer or his running mate on message.

    McCain: contrite about Keating Five, becomes campaign finance reformer to make amends.

    McCain’s lawyer: a classic political smear job! cheap shot! stooge!

    McCain: Rev. Wright is off-limits for discussion.

    Palin: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

    Meanwhile, getting blessed by a pastor who is venerated on the right specifically for being a literal witch-hunter who successfully drove a woman out of her home is just standard Republican fare.
    http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45024

  2. Bruce Henry says:
    October 7, 2008 at 7:19 pm

    PG, I bow to you. Where you been? You’re good.

  3. PG says:
    October 8, 2008 at 1:03 pm

    I’m weaning myself off blogging by not writing posts, but I’m still finding it hard not to write comment :-P

    I’ve also started mass-mailing my unfortunate family and friends so I can let off steam after the debates.

    Today’s fun fact: Although McCain mocked Obama for being a “celebrity” overseas, it turns out that McCain is HUGE in Vietnam — bigger than Walter Cronkite — and has been since 1985.

    - McCain, suggesting his Treasury Secretary pick — “Meg Whitman was CEO of a company that started with 12 people and is now 1.3 million people in America make their living off eBay.”

    Not 1.3 million Americans, not making their living, and more to the point, not the 1600 eBay employees — 10% of eBay’s 16,000 person workforce — who got laid off on Monday.

    - McCain, misunderstanding what Fannie and Freddie do after talking down to his audience by saying they’d probably never heard of the FMs before this crisis: “But you know, they’re the ones that, with the encouragement of Sen. Obama and his cronies and his friends in Washington, that went out and made all these risky loans, gave them to people that could never afford to pay back.”
    Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn’t make loans; they dominated the secondary mortgage market, i.e. the buying up of loans other people had made.

    - McCain, saying the Democrats were corrupted into helping Fannie and Freddie: “Meanwhile, they were getting all kinds of money in campaign contributions. Sen. Obama was the second highest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac money in history — in history.”

    Obama got his money almost entirely from the rank and file employees who donate on their own initiative. The top 4 recipients of money from Fannie’s and Freddie’s Political Action Committees — the campaign donations that the corporation itself controls — are Republicans. See attached Excel sheet copying this chart and sorting it by the highest contributions from the FMs’ PACs.

    - McCain, on why our fundamentals are strong: “The point is — the point is that we can fix our economy. Americans’ workers are the best in the world. They’re the fundamental aspect of America’s economy. They’re the most innovative. They’re the best — they’re most — have best — we’re the best exporters.”

    This must be a meaning for “best” that doesn’t mean “most successful based on value of goods and services exported,” as Germany and China are the world’s best exporters by that measure.

    Neither candidate would talk about entitlement reform when Brokaw asked about it. Cowards.

    - McCain: “To giving every American a $5,000 refundable tax credit and go out and get the health insurance you want rather than mandates and fines for small businesses, as Sen. Obama’s plan calls for.”

    Unfortunately, business is being uncommonly ungrateful to the Republican candidate — they don’t like his idea of taxing employer-provided health benefits.

    Good thing one of the voter question was about entitlement reform, although Obama still won’t answer because he wants to talk about taxes.

    - McCain: “My friends, what we have to do with Medicare is have a commission, have the smartest people in America come together, come up with recommendations, and then, like the base-closing commission idea we had, then we should have Congress vote up or down. Let’s not let them fool with it anymore. There’s too much special interests and too many lobbyists working there.”

    Before going into Congress, McCain was the liaison between Congress and the executive branch’s Secretary of the Navy. ‘As the Navy’s top lobbyist, McCain was supposed to carry out the bidding of the secretary of the Navy. But in 1978 he went off the reservation. Vietnam was over, and the Carter administration, cutting costs, had decided against spending $2 billion to replace the aging carrier Midway. The secretary agreed with the administration’s decision. Readiness would not be affected. The only reason to replace the carrier — at a cost of nearly $7 billion in today’s dollars — was pork-barrel politics. Although he now crusades against wasteful military spending, McCain had no qualms about secretly lobbying for a pork project that would pay for a dozen Bridges to Nowhere. “He did a lot of stuff behind the back of the secretary of the Navy,” one lobbyist told Timberg. Working his Senate connections, McCain managed to include a replacement for the Midway in the defense authorization bill in 1978. Carter, standing firm, vetoed the entire spending bill to kill the carrier. When an attempt to override the veto fell through, however, McCain and his lobbyist friends didn’t give up the fight. The following year, Congress once again approved funding for the carrier. This time, Carter — his pork-busting efforts undone by a turncoat Navy liaison — signed the bill.’

    - McCain, unaware of how Republicans make fun of Al Gore for this: “I traveled all over the world looking at the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, Joe Lieberman and I.” Somehow I doubt those travels were on emissions-free bicycles and sailboats. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to stay home and email scientists about it?

    - McCain, forgetting where his daughter’s Prius was made: “We can move forward, and clean up our climate, and develop green technologies, and alternate — alternative energies for — for hybrid, for hydrogen, for battery-powered cars, so that we can clean up our environment and at the same time get our economy going by creating millions of jobs. We can do that, we as Americans, because we’re the best innovators”

    Hybrid technology already has been developed, and it got innovated in Asia because Americans were busy buying SUVs (categorized as “trucks” and therefore exempt from cars’ fuel standards) and domestic automakers thought that would last forever.

    McCain makes the accurate point that Obama didn’t say how much he would fine parents who refuse to get their children health care when a government-sponsored plan is available.

    - McCain, apparently not remembering that the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan *were* the Taliban: “We drove the Russians out with — the Afghan freedom fighters drove the Russians out of Afghanistan, and then we made a most serious mistake. We washed our hands of Afghanistan. The Taliban came back in, Al Qaeda, we then had the situation that required us to conduct the Afghan war.”

    I have seen people criticizing McCain for referring to Petraeus as having control of our military in Afghanistan (the commanding general there is McKiernan), but McCain is correct here as of the end of October, when Petraeus will shift from being Commanding General of the Multi National Force in Iraq to being Commander of U.S. Central Command, which includes both Iraq and Afghanistan.

    - McCain indicating a bizarre view of what oil wealth does for good government: “But have no doubt that Russia’s behavior is certainly outside the norms of behavior that we would expect for nations which are very wealthy, as Russia has become, because of their petro dollars.”

    The world’s top 15 oil producers in 2006 is a list where consistent respect for rights is an exception (U.S., Canada, Norway). Russia is little worse than Mexico, UAE, Iraq, Brazil, Nigeria and Algeria, and much better than Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Venezuela and Kuwait. I don’t think respect for freedom of the press, etc. is a “norm of behavior” for petrocracies; if anything, an oil-driven economy concentrates wealth in a few hands — especially state-owned hands (Obama “the amount of petro dollars that they have to make mischief”) — and makes it unnecessary to keep an economically diverse middle class happy.

    McCain wins on the “Is Russia under Putin an evil empire” question. If you can’t say yes or no, the second best answer is “maybe” and an explanation of why you can’t say yes or no.

    - McCain, basing his view of Americans on his VP: “we will be talking about countries sometime in the future that we hardly know where they are on the map, some Americans”

  4. marshalsandler.com » McCain Profile: The Keating Five and Michigan Involvement! says:
    October 9, 2008 at 10:21 am

    [...] Shorter McCain On Keating [...]