Jack & Jill Politics

It looks like McCain brought up the Keating Five scandal to garner sympathy as a partisan smear.  However, according to John Aravosis over at AMERICABLOG, McCain did more damage than good by bringing this up and trying to blame Democrats for the craptacular fashion that has become his Presidential campaign:

I’m listening to the McCain campaign conference call about John McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal. McCain’s lawyer just said that the Keating Five investigation was “political” as it concerned John McCain. He shouldn’t even have been admonished by the Senate, his lawyer says.

Then McCain’s lawyer dropped the real bomb.

The Keating Five Investigation was “a political smear job on John [McCain].” WTF? He called Howell Heflin, who led the hearings, a “stooge” of the Democratic machine out to get poor, innocent John McCain.

This opens up the entire question of McCain’s supposed contrition. If McCain thinks he did nothing wrong, and that it was wrong for the Senate to scold him for his actions during the Keating Five Scandal, then he isn’t contrite at all, he isn’t sorry at all. He’s learned nothing. You can’t turn a new leaf when you don’t think you did anything wrong. This is one hell of an admission.

Click here to listen to the conference call where this admission was made.

Additionally, Jonathan Singer at MyDD.com has a more telling detail about McCain’s relationship to Keating:

And just how closely was McCain tied to the Keating Five scandal? Very. Though McCain might try to downplay his involvement, his campaigns received $124,000 from Keating and his associates during the 1980s (AP, 3/2/91), and McCain was described as being personally closer to Keating than any of the other members of the Keating Five (Roll Call, 1/20/92). What’s more, McCain accepted more than $15,000 in free trips from Keating, including vacations to Keating’s resort in the Bahamas — trips that McCain failed to disclose at the time (New York Times, 2/28/91; San Francisco Chronicle, 12/3/90).

With a record like this, do we really want to concede issues of ethics and clean government to McCain? Shouldn’t we instead be hitting him hard for his improprieties? I certainly think so. And I definitely hope that in the case that McCain wins the Republican nomination this year that whomever the Democrats nominate roasts McCain on the issue as he so deserves to be roasted.

Obama is a brilliant strategist to be firing his missiles at McCain right about now.  The Dow continues to tank, even after passing the Corporate Welfare Banking Bail Out bill, so apparently, that legislative solution didn’t work.  He’s using Sarah Palin to engage in kitchen-sink strategies to deflect this attention off his corrupt ass – and that’s not working, either.

Additionally, the other four senators in the Keating Five were all DEMOCRATS. One of them was my home Senator, Alan Cranston. And the Republicans didn’t take over both Houses of Congress until 1994. So how was the Congressional investigation a witchhunt?

McCain can’t answer that, either.  Not without telling more lies.

The mudslinging is that of a dying man who knows it and sees it coming.  And he is a dying man because he just handed himself enough rop to hang himself.