Joe Biden's gaffes?

Supposedly Joe the senator has been making lots of gaffes. Jon Stewart on the Daily show did a bit on the election gaffes and they had Biden's last "gaffe" (as of this writing) which is supposedly this:

"Mark my words," Biden said. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's going to need help ... to stand with him. Because it's not going to be apparent initially; it's not going to be apparent that we're right."

And yet, in spite of all the gaffes Joe the senator supposedly makes, Obama's poll numbers keep going up and John the candidates keep going down. Maybe Joe the senator is even smarter than he often looks and sounds and his gaffes aren't all that gaffy.

Now what exactly makes that statement a gaffe? Biden isn't wrong for it's quite probable Al Qaida, Iran or North Korea might test the next president to see what kind of response they'd get. If they don't, well, it might be because what Biden said was a self-negating prophesy that warned them that we were expecting it. And why wouldn't they be just as likely to test McCain to gauge his response?

Joe the senator was indeed talking only about Obama and not about both candidates. However, there's no good reason to assume that McCain wouldn't also be tested. The difference is that it's Obama who is most probably going to be elected, not McCain. If Biden made any mistake there it was in singling out Obama as the one to be tested and not including McCain. That was the slip that invited the right-wing pundits, as well as John the candidate and Caribou Barbie, to pounce on Joe's statement to make a claim that Obama wasn't ready to be commander-in-chief.

They even made this ad:


When you're as far behind as McCain is, you've got nothing left but Biden's crumbs and the attempt to make this mole hill into a mountain. Alas, these crumbs might have a bit of rat poison in them.

McCain said we don't want a "president who invites testing" and then went on to claim that he had already been tested because he was on board the USS Enterprise off of Cuba when America came close to nuclear war. Then he said a noun, a verb, and "Joe the plumber." I fail to see how McCain was tested by sitting on an aircraft carrier off of Cuba. The test of being ready to drop bombs when ordered has zero to do with what Al Qaida or Iran might have in mind for a president. And just bringing up images of Kennedy and the cold war also brings up the images young people think about the cold war with, one of the big ones being Kubrick's movie, Dr. Strangelove and then I'm seeing that scene where Slim Pickens, as Major Kong, is riding a nuclear bomb down onto oblivion:



Only in my mind I'm seeing John the candidate waving his cowboy hat, singing "bomb bomb bomb... bomb bomb bomb Iran-hahan..." while riding that bomb down on top of Tehran. John the candidate should be careful of talking about carriers, Kennedy and the cold war when he himself sounds like a character from Dr. Strangelove:



McCain's example of being tested is nothing but meaningless bluster. Is it going to make Iran think twice before threatening us if McCain is president? Is it going to make our enemies too scared to mess with America? "I have been tested, my friends," McCain keeps telling us in stump speeches and interviews. Please, explain exactly how you were tested, John, because if that was it you're failing the intelligence test. You're being tested now by how you run your campaign and you're failing that test badly.

Some right-wing pundits, like Ed Whelan, jumped in with "Re: Biden: Obama's Inexperience Will Prompt International Crisis":

The Biden quote ... is really remarkable.

No, it's not remarkable. It's part of one of the few things right-wing pundits have been saying for awhile that is partly on target: If Obama is elected, “we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Biden even doubts that Obama will respond to the crisis in a way that inspires confidence. He tells Obama’s supporters that Obama is “gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Oh no! It sounds like one of our foes is going to push Obama to the brink of war to see if he backs down! Hey, wait... Bush already went over that brink, in one case with good reason, in another case with bad reasons, so how much worse could anyone do? Our foes these days are pissant little countries compared to the old Soviet empire and they are no match for us. The problem isn't that we're not able to bomb them back to the stone age without taking too bad a hit, the problem is we can't make them feel good about America after we've bombed them back to the stone age.

Does anyone really need any additional reasons not to vote for Obama? (If so, there are lots of them.)

It wasn't reason enough the first time it was brought up, why would it be a reason now? Biden was just repeating a criticism already made by right-wing pundits.

In Ed Morrissey's "Biden: Obama’s inexperience will prompt nations to test us" we have this:

In a stunning statement, Biden acknowledged that Obama’s lack of foreign-policy experience will provoke America’s enemies into creating an international crisis. Biden apparently thinks this is just terrific.

A stunning statement? What is stunning about it? Does he assume that voters should only be lied too and pandered too? He asks:

Isn’t this an argument for electing someone with more experience?

No, it's not. Though it would depend on the experience, of course. The word "experience" is too general. The word "experience" is at best shorthand for "appropriate experience." I have experience with blogging and sitting around watching television. Does that qualify me for anything besides blogging and TV watching? Now, what experience does John the candidate have that would make it easier for him to deal with such a test?

Then there's a pathetic and transparently phony attempt at mind reading:

Biden seems convinced that electing John McCain will make our enemies abroad much less sanguine about provoking us — which is one of the best arguments yet heard for electing McCain.

No, Joe the senator never said anything about John the candidate not being tested if he won. And right now it doesn't look like McCain will win, so it will be Obama and not McCain who is tested.

Even worse, Biden admits that an Obama administration will likely fumble the ball. “It’s not going to be apparent that we’re right.” Really? Why not?

No, that doesn't mean that Biden thinks he'll fumble, it just means Obama and Biden will do something that people will question, like they questioned Kennedy when he told Nikita Khrushchev to take his missiles home "or else" because Kennedy wasn't going to let the Russians set 'em up in Cuba. We went to the brink of war and that scared people.

When Biden says "It’s not going to be apparent that we’re right." It assumes they will be right but that people won't see why until later. Kennedy certainly made mistakes in getting us to the point where he had to do that, but it turned out that he was right to go to the brink at that one point because the Russians did back down.

I’d rather avoid the problem altogether and elect a man who puts enough fear into the minds of our enemies to keep them from testing us at all.

A man who puts fear into our enemies? That's not really a good idea. Fear is what makes our enemies dangerous, it's what makes us dangerous. Saying that electing McCain would avoid the problem because McCain is such a blood-thrirsty hawk that he'll just nuke whoever gets in his way is rather crazy, and that's what scares me more.

It's strange, all these gaffes that Joe the senator is supposedly making only make me respect and admire the man more than I did before. Every time the right-wing pundits call attention to one my first thought is usually "that's it, that's all you've got against this guy?" And then I think of all the gaffes I'd probably be making if I were in his shoes, for example, when I wrote "Our foes these days are pissant little countries compared to the old Soviet empire and they are no match for us. The problem isn't that we're not able to bomb them back to the stone age without taking too bad a hit, the problem is we can't make them feel good about America after we've bombed them back to the stone age" that would have been a potentially career ending gaffe if I were running for high office.

Joe the senator sometimes gets his facts wrong, but he doesn't get important and relevant facts wrong, like when McCain mixed up Sunni and Shiite. I don't think he gets policy too wrong, not like McCain advocating deregulation days before the Wallstreet meltdown and about a month before Greenspan admits that the philosophy behind deregulation is flawed. And political gaffes, that's when you offend some interest group perceived to be important to your success, well nothing Biden has said was as bad as Obama's "they're bitter and clinging to their guns and religion" line.

None of these guys are gaffe free, but Biden's gaffe's have been the mildest of all of them. The worst they do is make him sound too honest for his own good. I like that kind of mental transparency in government.


UPDATE:

Well, it seems that my comment: "When you're as far behind as McCain is, you've got nothing left but Biden's crumbs and the attempt to make this mole hill into a mountain. Alas, these crumbs might have a bit of rat poison in them," is looking more and more on target. Watch this:



Then check out how the right-wing blogs are dealing with it. Or, just read Anonymous Liberal's post:

They seem to think Biden somehow embarrassed himself or got rattled during the interview. The fact that they think that is further evidence of the rapidly widening gulf between the reality most of us inhabit and the alternate universe where most right wing bloggers now reside.

The Sarah Palin Amendment

I don't think that James Fallows was entirely serious when he proposed this 28th Amendment to the Constitution:

"No Person shall be elected President or Vice President without accepting a session of questioning by the press, such session to last no less than one hour and to be open to normally accredited members of the press in the same fashion as at Presidential news conferences. The questioning shall occur and the results shall be made freely available to the public at least one week before an Election is held."

Three weeks to get it enacted.

I think a Sarah Palin Amendment would be a good idea. However, instead of just "accredited members of the press" why not members of the Congress and the Senate representing both parties and then a town hall with questioning members of the public selected based on a raffle? Make the campaigns a more formal process where candidates must be questioned by the opposition. The problem with the "accredited members of the press" qualification is that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh might be enough to get Palin over that hurdle.

Palin shouldn't be allowed to get away with just doing one debate and canned rally speeches with a folksy pronunciation of phrases like "you betcha" and "doggone it" that makes her sound like a clone of Frances McDormand in the movie "Fargo" to get elected.

The VP debate

Caribou Barbie did better in the VP debate than she did with her interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson. Most of the time she managed to put words together in a reasonably coherent manner, but it was still cringe-worthy. It was the follow-up questions from Couric that tripped her up before, and the debate format either didn't allow for that kind of follow-up question, or the moderator didn't want to go there. As a result, there were Republican spin doctors out there calling the debate a win for Palin.

For example, Pat Buchanan said:

"Sarah Palin was sensational tonight. She not only met the expectations, I think she wiped up the floor with Joe Biden, quite frankly. She is personable, she is young. She has got a sense of humor. She looked straight into the camera while Joe is talking to Gwen all evening long. I thought she didn't make a mistake, not a foot fault in the whole thing. ... I was astonished at how well she did. ... There are conservatives and Republicans across America who are ... breathing a sigh of relief. ... She has recaptured that magic she had out there at the convention. ... I think that McCain campaign, given the economic problems, I don't know if they can turn this around, but if it can be turned around, I think she has done it in the sense that of the four debaters we've seen, she was the most interesting, attractive of them all"

Notice how its all superficial stuff that Pat praises, not the substance of the debate. Also, note the reference to the convention because I'll get back to that.

Another example, David Brooks', "The Palin Rebound":

She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies. She established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative.

By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.

A radical alternative? No, I don't think so. In order to be a radical alternative Palin and McCain are going to first have to prove that they actually understand what was wrong with the way the Bush administration governed during these last 8 years.

Remember when Couric asked her what is the "best and worst thing that Dick Cheney has done as Vice President?" Biden talked about shredding the constitution, condoning torture, the idea of a unitary executive where the Congress and the people have no power in a time of war and the President controls everything. However, Palin said the worst thing was the duck hunting accident. Then she praised Cheney for supporting the troops.

You can't be an alternative to Bush and Cheney until you can describe what they've done wrong.

Michelle Malkin wrote:

She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.

Jay Reding wrote:

Palin is not at all as polished as Biden, but she’s coming off as authentic. She doesn’t have full command of the debate, but she’s not just making things up like Biden has been all night.

Authentic? Really? Let us recall the previous authentic horrors:



I was hoping to see Caribou Barbie deliver another display of inept bullshit as she pretended to answer a question she really didn't have an answer for, which she did, but this time she did it much better. She was still one dimensional and still not really answering the questions. She even said something like, "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also." Thus she dodged, picking and choosing her topics. She had studied her talking points and doggedly stuck to them. Toward the end she recycled and repeated a few.

Palin didn't even need to comprehend the questions, she ignored them and went down her checklist of speechifying rhetoric. Of course, this always happens in debates, but usually the politician can do a smoother segue into the point and then customize their stock bit enough to make it seem like an answer. In the end, what she did was work another convention speech into her answers and thus the problem with her answers was the same problem I had with her convention speech. One guy who explained that problem was Matt Taibbi, in his Rolling Stone article, Mad Dog Palin:

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.
-- Matt Taibbi, Mad Dog Palin

Matt Taibbi pointed out, in the above article, that we're being asked to judge character, not substance, which is what Jay Reding, Michelle Malkin, and Pat Buchanan were doing, but the character we are given is the product of a script that is designed to massage Republican partisan egos.

I'm not saying Biden was great, both of our master debaters ejaculated their gooey platitudes and sticky talking points all over the audience, but there was more substance to his answers.

UPDATE:
How did I miss Rich Lowry's orgasmic "Little Starbursts"?

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

If you saw any utterly syrupy, iky, Republican spin on Palin that I missed, please share and leave a quote in my comments section.

The political science of the future is neuroscience

Have you been wondering about why both presidential campaigns have been trafficing in dishonest allegations and pseudofacts? Why does such blatant lying work when both sides keep getting caught at it? Have you been wondering why Obama never accepted McCain's request to have ten town-hall face-offs?

Have you been wondering why American politics seems to be so insane?

Neuroscientists have been asking themselves these kind of questions too and there are all sorts of neuroscientific studies out there edging toward an explanation of how emotion and reason are activated by political stimuli. This nytimes.com article points to one difference between the brains of liberals and conservatives, the study reported on indicates that liberal brains have, on average, more active amygdalas than conservative ones. It matches some stereotypes about liberal values: an aversion to human suffering, an unwillingness to rationalize capital punishment and military force, a fondness for candidates who like to "feel our pain." You can see it in how most Hollywood and music stars tend to be liberal Democrats, those are people who make professional use of their amygdalas.

This little factoid might also help explain why Obama and McCain's negotiations over the townhall face-offs failed and why Obama ultimately prefers to just do his speeches solo. It's a little odd that Obama, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was editor of the Harvard Law Review, would not want to debate McCain who graduated with a low class rank (894 of 899) from the United States Naval Academy.

You'd think that Obama could wipe the floor with McCain considering their educational differences. However, it's more important to Obama to go after the heart (the amygdala), he knows how he got where he is. He knows he has performed best at massive, emotional rallies drawing tens of thousands of people. He knows that the reaction he got there is something he wasn't able to do during the debates during the primaries.

In every presidential campaign bargaining over debates happens and both sides try get a PR edge by seeming to offer more interaction yet protecting themselves and favoring their own strengths. McCain offered 10 town-hall debates, but Obama only wanted 1 so talks stalled over disagreements. They squabbled over format with McCain wanting an intimate town-hall format that would feature interaction with voters and would be more revealing than formal debates. It also would give him free media attention alongside the better-funded Obama. However, Obama clearly sacrificed that PR edge and selected to do minimal debating. McCain is now using that failure to claim that he’s ready to engage any time, any place and that Obama isn’t. The Obama camp seemed chicken. Why wouldn't they be, polling was favoring them at the time.

An aggressive McCain might have dominated the more cerebral and gentle Obama in such debates if they were too informal. And then there is Jonah Lehrer's blog post, "Why the Facts Don't Matter in Politics," which quotes a Washington Post article, "The Power of Political Misinformation," that seems to indicate that most of voters are just partisan hacks:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.

While conservatives do seem to have more rigid, fact immune, views than liberals do, it should be noted that Obama has been caught using his own distortions. For example, this cbsnews.com article shows how Barack Obama's charge that John McCain wants to tax the health insurance benefits that Americans buy through employers is a bit of distorted fear-mongering. Also, this abcnews.com article, shows how Obama was equating McCain with Limbaugh on the issue of immigration. McCain is less hostile to the plight of illegal immigrants than Rush Limbaugh.

You may not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals have such misinformation corrected, but Obama knows he can get away with it because McCain has already done worse when distorting Obama's record. You can't abandon Obama in favor of McCain to punish him for lying because then you'd only be endorsing a worse liar.

In the end voters on both sides think that they're thinking, but what they're really doing is rationalizing and ignoring facts so that they can explain decisions they've already made. Once you identify with a political party, the world is edited so that it fits with your ideology. We see the same effect with any religion or world view. We all tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe.

Something like McCain's town-hall meetings might have undercut the cumulative effect of all these invented facts and ignored facts on both sides that explains why Republicans and Democrats seem to live in two different realities. However, merely knowing more about politics doesn't erase partisan bias because the world of politics is too complicated to hold in a single human brain. If a piece of information doesn't follow your party's talking points, then the information is conveniently ignored. Another example:

Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990's to prove the same point. During the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What's interesting about this data is that so-called "high-information" voters - these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress - weren't better informed than "low-information" voters. (The sole exception was Republicans who are ranked in the top 10 percent in terms of political information. As Bartels notes, it's only among these people that "the pull of objective reality begins to become apparent.")

Clinton's deficit reduction didn't fit the "tax and spend liberal" stereotype so the majority of Republicans never managed to absord that fact.

This doesn't let Democrats off the hook, of course, while less rigid than Republicans, Democrats are also adept at ignoring facts according to the brain scans.

When people were asked, in 2004, to evaluate statements by Bush and Kerry, both Republicans and Democrats ignored information that could not rationally be discounted. That kind of psychological blind spot is going to require more than a lot of McCain's town-hall meetings. The intimate format with voters won't cut it. You'd really want experts to help cut through the spin.

Whatever fix we might imagine being enforced on the political process I would want to test it against the emerging neuroscientific political theories so that we can all benefit from an increased understanding of the neural processes involved in value-laden information processing. The goal would be to minimize distortions and the repression of inconvenient facts. I would like to see fact checking happening while the candidates debate. I would like us build on studies in consciousness, theory of mind, and social cognition to construct ways of dealing with neural response to political information and then use that information to force voters to deal with real facts.

You should have expected the Spanish Inquisition

Andrew Sullivan has noted, in Southern Evangelicals And Torture, that a poll commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University has found that nearly six in ten, or 57 percent of, white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified. They are the core supporters of Bush's torture regime and 65 percent of them support the now pro-torture candidate, John McCain. They think torture can sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists and only balk at torture when they are reminded that this could come back to hurt Americans or if reminded of the golden rule. Only thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified. Most of them, 53 percent of white Southern evangelicals, know that George W. Bush is a liar on torture. They think the government uses torture in its anti-terrorism campaign, despite claims to the contrary. Only one-third, or 32 percent, said the government does not use torture as a matter of policy.

It is not that historically surprising for Christians to endorse torture, remember Spanish Inquisition? What else would you expect from a religion with a doctrine of Redemptive Suffering? The Cross is a symbol of excruciating death and it highlights the sadomasochistic glorification of pain at the core of Christianity. People who suffer are ennobled and find the need for Jesus and God (or at least a delusional escape from reality) and appreciate the suffering Jesus underwent when he sacrificed Himself for the Sins of Mankind on the Cross.

Of course, Andrew Sullivan isn't the kind of Christian who would see the connection between a doctrine of Redemptive Suffering and Bush's torture program, but he sure has been relentless these last two weeks, posting morning, noon and night, weeks and weekdays, exposing the lies of the McCain-Palin campaign. Yet, even while he highlights their unfitness for office in terms of competence, decency, intelligence, and experience, the Palin bounce seems to be holding and polling suggests that McCain is gaining ground.

My John McCain music

I chose the one that spelled out the lyrics because they were important, but there's a nice bit of visual imagery in the video here.

I heard this song years ago when it was on MTV, I liked it, but then it just sank into forgetfulness and laid there quietly for years until recently when bits and pieces of the lyrics began surfacing again after seeing some of John McCain's ads. So, I typed in the lyrics I could remember into Google, "I am just a worthless liar," and "Trust in me and fall as well." And that gave me the name of the band and the title of the song and from there all I had to do was go to YouTube and look it up -- finding several versions.

This is how John McCain should feel when this election is over, win or lose.

There's a shadow just behind me
Shrouding every step I take
Making every promise empty
Pointing every finger at me

Waiting like a stalking butler
Who upon the finger rests
Murder now the path called "must we"
Just before the son has come

Jesus, won't you fucking whistle
Something but the past and done?
Jesus, won't you fucking whistle
Something but the past and done?

Why can't we not be sober?
I just want to start this over
Why can't we drink forever?
I just want to start this over

I am just a worthless liar
I am just an imbecile
I will only complicate you
Trust in me and fall as well

I will find a center in you
I will chew it up and leave
I will work to elevate you
Just enough to bring you down

Mother Mary won't you whisper
Something but what's past and done?
Mother Mary won't you whisper
Something but what's past and done?

Why can't we not be sober?
I just want to start things over
Why can't we sleep forever?
I just want to start this over

I am just a worthless liar
I am just an imbecile
I will only complicate you
Trust in me and fall as well

I will find a center in you
I will chew it up and leave
Trust me Trust me Trust me Trust me Trust me

Why can't we not be sober?
I just want to start things over
Why can't we sleep forever?
I just want to start this over

I want what I want
I want what I want
I want what I want
I want what I want

Spread this around

Can McCain be redefined as a crook?

When the Federal Government announced the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, did it remind you of anything? Did it remind you of another bailout that cost taxpayers billions of dollars? Did it remind you of something that happened about 20 years ago, in a time of similar economic doldrums? Did it remind you of when the government bailed out the S&L industry? The Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the late 1980’s-early 1990’s?

How many of you remember the Keating 5 Scandal? Senator McCain was one of the Keating 5 and back during the 2000 Republican Presidential Primaries Slate ran an article about McCain and his role in the scandal.

In the early 1980s, under the Reagan/Bush administration, the Savings and Loan industry was deregulated so much so that abuse and misuse of funds became easy, rampant, and went unchecked. The S&L scandal was the largest theft in the history of the world and it was US tax payers who were robbed. The cost to tax payers was over $1.4 TRILLION dollars (about one quarter of our national debt).

Charles Keating owned a savings and loan and he was illegally using the bank’s customers money to give loans to himself and friends, loans they didn’t have to repay. They speculated on risky real estate investments, (forbidden by law because it was one cause of the Great Depression) and McCain’s wife, Cindy, and her father, made a $359,000 investment in retail property owned by Charles Keating in 1986, a year before John McCain first met with federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Years later, Cindy McCain sold her investment for $15,000,000. Keating blew $3.4 billion through illegal personal loans and bad investments, and the FDIC had to reimburse Keating’s customers who had been ripped off.

When the feds first started investigating Keating, he wined, dined, and lavished on five U.S. Senators hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations and personal gifts. McCain filed false income tax returns to hide the thousands of dollars in gifts that he got from Keating. Keating was influence peddling, contributing heavily to the election campaigns of these senators. The five senators met with federal banking regulators and allegedly lobbied for favorable treatment for Lincoln Savings and Loan. When the IRS found Keating’s company had written off the gifts as business expenses (influence peddling is tax deductible?), McCain admitted to filing false returns and then he leaked information about the Keating Five to the press in an effort to appear above the other Senators in the scandal. A 1989 article was titled, "McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five."

Keating had asked the five Senators to influence the feds, and the Senators, the Keating Five, met with federal investigators and pressured them to stop investigating Keating. They bought Keating some time, but the feds still nailed Keating. He was convicted on 73 counts of fraud, conspiracy, and other crimes.

Keating wasn’t the only Savings and Loan owner who committed fraud, about 20% of the S&L’s that failed during that time were caused by fraud and/or insider trading. The failure of the Lincoln Savings and Loan and other S&L’s pushed the country into a recession, costing the U.S. government $126 billion dollars in FDIC insurance payouts to investors. This happened during George H.W. Bush's term and he pushed through the S&L bailout and then his son Neil Bush was charged with criminal wrongdoing in the case of Silverado S&L. He was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for pleading guilty to $8.7 million in theft. (You'd get more jail time for holding up a gas station for $50.)

John McCain was formally rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising “poor judgment” for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating, but because McCain accepted Keating’s gifts of travel and vacations to Bahama while McCain was a member of the House of Representatives the Senate claimed they had no jurisdiction to censure McCain at that time.

McCain has successfully defined himself as a war-hero and a maverick reformer, but using material like this he could easily be redefined as a crook. McCain lobbied for a crook to get him favorable treatment and helped him perpetrate his fraud. McCain claims he wants to eliminate pork and wasteful spending, yet he helped these S&L guys steal millions from the taxpayers in a scandal that cost billions overall. That costs us more than all the pork McCain might have ever saved us from. Keating was essentially stealing money from the government because the savings and loan funds were federally insured deposits.

Considering the lying 30-second TV attack ad used against Obama's record on education, saying that Obama backed legislation to teach sex education to kindergartners with an announcer saying, "Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family," I think Obama ought to fight back with an ad featuring McCain as one of the Keating 5.

UPDATE:
I read through another article: "Both McCain and Obama have ties to loan giants," from the Herald Tribune.

It notes that for all the outrage they express, neither Obama, with less than four years in the Senate, and McCain, after a quarter-century in the House and Senate, has a record of directly challenging the companies. All the more reason for Obama to make an ad in which he promises to insist on proper regulation.

Other useful factoids from the article:

1) Obama did warn publicly of a coming housing crisis in March 2007, five months before it erupted and the government first took action.

2) McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, a longtime lobbyist. Davis previously was head of the Homeownership Alliance, a coalition of banks and housing industry interests led by Fannie and Freddie to stave off regulations. McCain's confidant and adviser Charlie Black, whose firm worked for Freddie Mac for several years ending in 2005, and the deputy campaign finance chairman, Wayne Berman, a vice president for Ogilvy Worldwide and a former Fannie Mae lobbyist.

3) Six members of the Republican lobbying firm Fierce Isakowitz & Blalock, all Fannie Mae lobbyists, have given McCain $13,250.

4) The New York investor Geoffrey Boisi, a member of Freddie Mac's board, contributed more than $70,000 to McCain and Republican Party committees working for his election. Both he and Richard Hohlt, a Fannie Mae lobbyist, are among the McCain "bundlers" who have raised $100,000 to $250,000 from others, according to the campaign Web site.

UPDATE 2:
They did it:



The Obama camp released this 30-second trailer for a 13-minute video highlighting McCain's connection to the scandal that will be released in full soon on the website keatingeconomics.com:

http://www.keatingeconomics.com/