McCain: The Most Reprehensible Of The Keating Five (1989)

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A blast to the past

Phoenix New Times

McCain: The Most Reprehensible Of The Keating Five
The story of "the Keating Five" has become a scandal rivaling Teapot Dome and Watergate
By Tom Fitzpatrick
Published on November 29, 1989

You're John McCain, a fallen hero who wanted to become president so desperately that you sold yourself to Charlie Keating, the wealthy con man who bears such an incredible resemblance to The Joker.


Obviously, Keating thought you could make it to the White House, too.
He poured $112,000 into your political campaigns. He became your friend. He threw fund raisers in your honor. He even made a sweet shopping-center investment deal for your wife, Cindy. Your father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was cut in on the deal, too.

full text: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1989-11-29/news/mccain-the-most-reprehensible-of-the-keating-five/

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1. Don't forget mclame's dirty deals with Donald Diamond

mccain's bullshit past will make him unelectable. I think that may ne why some GOPer's didn't want him as the nominee. He has a lot of baggage.

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2. Critics Wonder What He Learned. (Boston Globe 2008)

Amid McCain's new status, old scandals stir
Critics wonder what he learned from Keating


By Michael Kranish
Globe Staff / February 28, 2008


WASHINGTON - As William K. Black watches John McCain move toward the Republican presidential nomination, he thinks of a day 21 years ago that he considers one of the most troubling of his life.

Black, a senior federal savings and loan regulator at the time, attended a meeting at which he felt McCain and four other senators pressured federal regulators to back off from investigating the troubled Lincoln Savings and Loan.

"I remain very upset that what they did caused such damage," said Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, recalling how Lincoln's bankruptcy cost the government $3 billion. Moreover, he said he believes McCain intervened partly because his wife had invested money with Lincoln chairman Charles Keating, a campaign contributor who let the McCains use his home in the Bahamas.

(snipping)

The events of 1987, when McCain met with regulators, and 1991, when the Senate Ethics Committee concluded that he used "poor judgment" in the matter, are only dimly remembered by many.

But McCain's emergence as the likely GOP nominee, combined with the rising volume of anti- lobbying rhetoric in the presidential campaign, has brought renewed attention to the Keating Five case, prompting questions about what McCain learned from it, what he's accepted was wrong, and whether he now is stepping back from some of his own scrutiny of his past errors.

McCain also has faced fresh criticism for pushing the Federal Communications Commission to make a decision in a 1999 case affecting another major campaign donor, Paxson Communications. Responding to recent coverage of that case, his campaign issued a statement last week saying the Arizona senator has "never done favors for special interests."

full text: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/28/amid_mccains_new_status_old_scandals_stir/

(bold caps mine)

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