McCain "Turns a Page" From What?

Senator McCain at a March 1990 hearing of the Senate Ethics Committee investigating the relationship between a group of senators and banker Charles Keating Jr.

Greg Strimple, one of McCain’s top advisers, said

"We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis..."

In the vice-presidential candidates debate Sarah Palin chided Joe Biden for talking about how we got to where we are now.

Of course, neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin wants to talk about how we got into the mess we are in now. In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

But it's not just McCain's role in the current crisis that they're avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time. During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Does this sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts -- and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.

I’ve just spent thirteen and a half minutes watching the new documentary “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis”. It details McCain’s role in the Keating scandal. Please take the time to view it.

When you watch it—be sure to check it against the independently ascertained facts in the Chicago Sun-Time “Fact vs. Fiction” breakdown on McCain’s role in the scandal—I think you will understand why his campaign wants to turn attention away from the current financial crisis and why Palin doesn’t want to talk about the past.

Although he denies it now, McCain was a supporter of privatizing Social Security back in 2004.

Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits."

With the crisis on Wall Street now, can you imagine where we would be if Bush had gotten his way, with support from those like McCain, and had privatized Social Security?

Swift boat-like personal attacks on Obama are the McCain campaign’s strategy for keeping voters from thinking about his failure of integrity and judgment in the two greatest economic crises since the Depression. He has failed both in his “experience” and his “judgment,” his own two standards of qualification to be president.

What was that old saying I heard from my mother?

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Don’t be distracted!

- Milo