Posted by JumpyPants
As the Giant says in Twin Peaks: "It's happening again."
Imagine a scandal in which senators were lobbied by corrupt money men to deregulate elements of the banking industry, and their actions ending up being such a disaster that it cost taxpayers billions in bailout moneys.
Sound familiar? It happened less than thirty years ago, and it was called the S&L Scandal aka The Keating Five.
And it has one more thing in common with the current disaster: John McCain. Because John McSleazeball was one of the five senators bought by Charles Keating.
From the wikipedia:
The core allegation of the Keating Five affair is that Keating had made contributions of about $1.3 million to various U.S. Senators, and he called on those Senators to help him resist regulators. The regulators backed off, to later disastrous consequences.
[snip]
McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981,and McCain was the closest socially to Keating of the five senators. Like DeConcini, McCain considered Keating a constituent as he lived in Arizona. Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.
Can we please, at this point, stop asking "what happened to John McCain?" as if he's fallen from some lofty perch? McCain was a slime bucket in the 80s, the 90s and now. Hell, he was a skidmark when he left his bed-ridden hospitalized first wife who had stuck by him through his tours of Vietnam and his POW internment. What's happened to John McCain is not that he's gotten more venal, just that he's gotten more sloppy. Slightly.
Read all about the Keating Five.