If you're still thinking - despite voluminous evidence to the contrary - that John McCain might be a (self-professed) "maverick" or represent some kind of break from the Bush/Cheney/DeLay model, read this first and think again.
...Speaking in Florida, [McCain] said that the economy's underlying fundamentals remained strong but were being threatened "because of the greed by some based in Wall Street and we have got to fix it."But his record on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party's embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline.
While Mr. McCain has cited the need for additional oversight when it comes to specific situations, like the mortgage problems behind the current shocks on Wall Street, he has consistently characterized himself as fundamentally a deregulator and he has no history prior to the presidential campaign of advocating steps to tighten standards on investment firms.
He has often taken his lead on financial issues from two outspoken advocates of free market approaches, former Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Individuals associated with Merrill Lynch, which sold itself to Bank of America in the market upheaval of the past weekend, have given his presidential campaign nearly $300,000, making them Mr. McCain's largest contributor, collectively.
Once again: "he has never departed in any major way from his party's embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline."
Case closed.
...Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.
[...]I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician's lap.
Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.
McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.
Until we take that theory/religion on and demolish it publicly, show it for the fraud it is, and the disasters it has created all around the globe, any whimpering about overisight or re-regulation does nothing to replace that underlying theory. It is, well lipstick on a pig.