The McCain campaign is now saying that the Keating Five investigation was 'a political smear job' on John McCain!

Holy crap.

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. Get more on the Keating Five Scandal at the new Obama campaign Web site, KeatingEconomics.com And here is the Obama campaign's new documentary about McCain's involvement in this ethics scanda (if the video isn't loading well, it may be because of the absurd amount of traffic trying to watch it - use this link instead if you're having a problem):


Ben Smith at Politico.com weighs in on this shocking news that McCain is now saying the Keating Five investigation was a set-up, a witch hunt, a partisan smear job, and that he did nothing wrong.

Iggy correctly pointed out last night that the other guys involved were Democrats. Someone should have sent the McCain team the memo though. It was actually 'a witch hunt conducted by a "stooge of the Democrats'! Just goes to show what miserable desperate, unrepentant, lying fucks the McCain campaign is.

But if McCain did nothing wrong, then why did he admit all these years to making a giant mistake during the Keating Five fiasco, a mistake that supposedly made McCain the maverick he is today? Or was McCain's giant mistake admitting guilt and taking ownership of his character flaws?

From Ben at Politico:

 Quote:
I'd always thought McCain's great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he'd acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.

So when his campaign puts his lawyer on the line with reporters to contest the details of a congressional inquiry that, largely, let McCain off the hook, doesn't that cloud the sin-confession-atonement dynamic a bit?

In Halperin's account, McCain lawyer John Dowd described McCain's "former relationship with Charles Keating as 'social friends,'" and called the situation a "classic political smear job on John."

Dowd also "thinks that the committee went too far in suggesting that McCain’s intervention with regulators was poor judgment," Halperin writes.

But if so, what's this giant mistake that transformed McCain into a reformer?


And as Ben noted earlier, McCain's Keating Five admission is the ENTIRE basis of his maverick brand:

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[I]n his 2002 autobiography, "the worst mistake of my life." He remade himself as a reformer in reaction to the scandal. McCain's case isn't that you should ignore his sin, or that it isn't a sin; it's that he's expiated it.


Not any more. It's George Bush all over again. Don't own up to anything. Deny everything. There are no facts that can' be disputed - even 20 year old facts that you've already copped to. Amazing.

Well so much for today being about Ovbama and Ayers. It's still the economy and John McCain's failure to understand or learn from his own mistakes.