John McCain, Hypocrite - A Story to remember

[FrenchieCat]

Revisiting The Keating 5
In order to understand John McCain's present circumstances, it may be helpful to recall his entry into the Senate, tarnished with scandal over the savings and loan system collapse in the late 1980s. John McCain had been a recipient of over $100,000 in donations from Charles Keating, the owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan and American Continental Corporation. Keating used the S&L to float out bad bonds in ACC, resulting in a $2 billion loss and bailout from the FSLIC and the loss of millions of dollars to ordinary shareholders in ACC.

McCain ran interference for Keating, as the Arizona Republic's Bill
Muller wrote:In 1982, during McCain's first run for the House, Keating held a fund-raiser for him, collecting more than $11,000 from 40 employees of American Continental Corp. McCain would spend more than $550,000 to win the primary and the general election.

In 1983, during McCain's second House race, Keating hosted a
$1,000-a-plate dinner for McCain, though he had no serious competition and coasted into his second term. When McCain pushed for the Senate in 1986, Keating was there with more than $50,000.

By 1987, McCain had received about $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. ...
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by Doug Ireland
www.OpEdNews.com
http://www.opednews.com/irelandDoug_031005_mccain.htm
John McCain, the media's darling, has found a clever way around his own campaign finance reform law to take big corporate bucks in furtherance of his political ambitions while carrying water for the corporate mammoth providing the dough. But the national press is ignoring the story.
snip
Now, let's be clear about the phony McCain-Feingold law, which I denounced as "campaign deform" before its passage. The myth is that McCain-Feingold abolished so-called soft money in politics. That's nonsense. It does forbid the national party committees (the RNC and the DNC) from taking soft money--but it leaves a loophole large enough to drive an invading army through, because soft money contributions to state parties are still legal. And, as anyone who closely followed the investigations of the 1996 campaign finance scandals knows, some of the most screamingly unethical influence peddling-and-buying then went on when, to conceal the contributions from a lazy national press corps, millions and millions of dollars in soft money were channeled to state parties by corporate fat-cats seeking to influence government policy and Congressional votes.

Moreover, McCain-Feingold put more corrupting hard money than ever before into the '04 presidential election by doubling the cap on hard money. This provision of McCain-Feingold motored the mushrooming of the practice known as "bundling," by which special interest influence-seekers -- like the lawyer-lobbyists of D.C.'s "Gucci Gulch" and their corporate clients -- get a large number of cronies to max out under the raised McCain-Feingold caps, the individual checks thus collected totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thanks in part to McCain-Feingold, then, the '04 presidential cycle was the most expensive ever in the nation's history. McCain-Feingold was, and is, a fraud.

Why did McCain, a standard-issue Republican conservative, lead the charge for the campaign "deform" law that bears his name? Why, because he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. McCain was one of the infamous Keating 5, the band of Senators--greedy for campaign cash--who sold their favors to jailed Savings and Loan kingpin and junk-bond racketeer Charles Keating in the S&L scandals that rocked Congress in the early '90s. (The S&L scandals were the most expensive corporate fraud in history, costing citizens and taxpayers some $600 billion. There is a pile of good books on the S&L Scandals, especially those by Steve Pizzo--who helped break the story; Pete Brewton; and Martin Mayer.) McCain was whitewashed by a complicitous Senate "ethics" committee, after which the Arizona Senator decided to refurbish his image and become a so-called "reformer"--hence the fraudulent McCain-Feingold bill, which was designed to make people forget his boot-licking service to Keating.
read the whole investigative story for information about McCain's current "Mess"!

[autorank]

1. Frenchie...great post, we need to remind people of this little "episode"

:hi:

[FrenchieCat]

2. Since so many "Dems" consider him "unbeatable"....

I thought I take a trip back. He doesn't look so unbeatable to me.

Now, I need to find dirt on the other probable GOP candidates. See, Dems can play that game too!

Might as well get involved in the Repub's primary, cause they sure got involved in ours in 2004.

If they want a piece of me, they'll get the piece that has their name on it!:evilgrin:

[autorank]

5. FrenchieCat

:yourock:

[Justitia]

3. Greatest Financial Fraud / Scandal / Theft in history

Thanks for bringing this up. I'm amazed at what short memories people have, especially when we (taxpayers) are still paying for this!

$1.4 TRILLION DOLLARS, folks - paid for by you and me, for 30 YEARS.

And yet somehow, these thieves are still elected.

Blows my freakin' mind. Guess I should have been a bank robber too.

[blogbear]

4. Stands to reason doesn't it?..

These well suited Republicans!

[FrenchieCat]

6. It's so sad, that even Dems forget their history as quickly

as it happens. Reminds me of 1984. If you can't remember it, it just might as well not have happened.

Looks like the media slobbering all over John McCain is caused by __________________ (fill in the blank)!
(cause I just don't know!)