McCain Wants to Burn $300 Billion More, Hopes Smoke Covers His Keating Economics

Debate number two showed us a condescending John McCain, talking about "that one" when referring to Senator Obama, and attempting to sway public opinion with a brand new "plan" that is already in place. This shows you how out of touch John McCain really is.

Of course, pouring an additional $300 billion in order to nationalize bad mortgages is a new and dangerous twist to the existing plan. Who is the fiscal conservative in this race? Only Bob Barr, is seems, with Obama more fiscally conservative than McCain.

And Obama again won the debate, acting far more presidential than mercurial McCain. He offered real policies for real problems, not posturing and demagoguery.

Over the weekend, John McCain's top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and "turn the page" to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama. Dirt, dirt, and more dirt from the mudslinging mavericks.

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

But it's not just McCain's role in the current crisis that they're avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.


Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts -- and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.

In fact, in the infamous Keating Five scandal, McCain was NOT exonerated, as his surrogates are fast to claim, reather he was censured for exercising "poor judgment." He still has poor judgment today.

There is a great 13-minute documentary about the scandal called "Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis" -- that you can see at www.KeatingEconomics.com, along with background information that every voter should know.

The point of the film and the web site is that John McCain still hasn't learned his lesson. He is still practicing Keating Economics today.

And this time, McCain's bankrupt economic philosophy has put our economy at the brink of collapse and put millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes.

Watch the video to see why John McCain's failed philosophy and poor judgment is a recipe for deepening the crisis: We cannot afford the risk of McCain and his Keating Economics.