Now They Tell Us –after we’re stuck with Crazy John McCain.

by Jeff Davis

For the past year, we have been enduring an excruciatingly long primary season, with ample opportunity for the media to publicly scrutinize the candidates. Instead the media has declared one front-runner after another from Giuliani to Fred Thomspon to Huckabee to Romney to McCain. Seemed like anyone-but-Ron Paul got favorable publicity regardless of whether their message stood any chance of success with the American people.

Last summer John McCain was floundering, and his campaign was all but dead. You’d think the media would have reported on his scandals then while (a).he was still relevant or (b).to finish him off completely. Instead, McCain’s scandals were not reported so that he could make the meteoric last minute rise, despite his key role in pushing an Amnesty Bill last June.

The New York Times just ran a full-bore “ethical expose” of McCain’s sleazy personal and political past–AFTER he had effectively secured the GOP nomination!

The Times article detailed McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist 31 years his junior, one Vicki Iseman, and also dredged up McCain-related scandals going all the way back to the Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980s and the Keating Five Scandal, when “an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, [McCain] reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame. But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.”

In other words, the man is an arrogant ass, who won’t take criticism (even constructive criticism from his friends).

The Times article also notes “Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client.”

The practice of thumbing a ride on a corporate jet is a common Congressional practice that covers a multitude of sins. All kinds of interesting things can happen in a luxury jet six miles above the earth on a nice long flight across country or maybe to Maui. Everything from a quiet deal over snifters of vintage cognac to a sordid romp with high-priced hookers to amnesty for 20 million Latinos. It’s easy to forget the little people (us) when you’re flying in luxury so high above.

Back to the Times: “With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding voters again of his record of reform. His campaign has already begun comparing his credentials with those of Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own pitch to voters.”

It should be kept in mind that John McCain is supposed to lose to the Democrat this election. Our election system has morphed into a political version of professional wrestling in which one candidate blusters and threatens and then takes a dive. This election a crooked Democrat will walk right over a badly flawed Republican candidate. In eight more years, a crooked Republican will be allowed to win.

The article goes on with more in the same vein, but what is interesting is the timing here. If McCain is such a sleaze, why did the New York Times wait all this time, until after McCain had secured the nomination, to start telling us all about it? Could it be that there was some prearranged plan to grease the skids for the Democratic nominee? But our wonderful democracy would never prearrange anything as important as an election. Would they?