It's a truly bizarre dance he's doing, frankly it doesn't make any sense. I'm actually starting to wonder about his grasp of reality at this point. (Beyond just regular Republican echo chamber spin stuff.)

I'm starting to wonder if his health might be the "October surprise" at this point. How can he argue that he was in charge of something that failed and thereby he is the person who can fix it?!? At the same time he says we need a "commission" to study what happened because we don't know? There is a really good ad here, a pure in-his-words piece.

It's a truly bizarre dance he's doing, frankly it doesn't make any sense. I'm actually starting to wonder about his grasp of reality at this point. (Beyond just regular Republican echo chamber spin stuff.)

I'm starting to wonder if his health might be the "October surprise" at this point. How can he argue that he was in charge of something that failed and thereby he is the person who can fix it?!? At the same time he says we need a "commission" to study what happened because we don't know? There is a really good ad here, a pure in-his-words piece.

"Profits are privatized and losses socialized."

Steve Benen wrote: "... was he just straying badly from the truth again?"

Please. Please. PLEASE. PLEASE!

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE !!!

Please just say "lying".

Because that's what McCain is doing: LYING.

Not fibbing, not stretching the truth, not straying from the truth.

LYING.

Thank you.

What I'm struck by is that McCain keeps blaming the financial crisis on (among other things, but this one always gets mentioned) "corruption." He never specifies what he means; I doubt if he means that Federal regulators have been bribed to look the other way. I doubt if he means that bankers have been bribed to make disastrous loans. I doubt if he means that investment bankers have been bribed to create hideously complex, extraordinarily hard-to-value instruments so their cronies could profit.

Actually, I see remarkably little scope for corruption here. Lots of people looked for ways to profit; in doing so, they created financial instruments that looked good, and that had some useful features (at least on the surface), like helping hedge risks. But no one understood them fully, and no one knew exactly how all the interrelationships worked. And a lot of people made a lot of money on the way up. (And, unfortunately, they aren't liable for the losses on the way down.)

The failure here is a failure to recognize that more complex isn't better, that hard-to-value instruments will become literally worthless once difficult times hit. The real failure is a reckless optimism, a belief that things could, and would, only go up.

More and better regulation would help. Extending the same sort of capital requirements that banks have to meet to the broader financial community would help. I think a (small) transactions tax would help (by squeezing out turnaround traders).

But "corruption" is a smokescreen, and I think McCain's using it because he believes that, fundamentally, no real changes need to be made. It's just a few "bad apples" (where have we heard that before?), just a few people gaming a "fundamentally sound" system.

And that's what's wrong with McCain's position.

He was in the Hanoi Hilton for five and half years, dammit. He doesn't need to remember what his committee's responsibilities are, or what policies he favors. He's tough. He'll just gather the titans of Wall Street together in a small room, along with the Shia and Sunnis, and tell them to cut the bullstuff.

And they will.

There is simply no way to blame this disaster, as Republicans used to do, on labor unions or over-regulation. No, this is the conservatives' beloved financial system doing what comes naturally. Freed from the intrusive meddling of government, just as generations of supply-siders and entrepreneurial exuberants demanded it be, the American financial establishment has proceeded to cheat and deceive and beggar itself -- and us -- to the edge of Armageddon. It is as though Wall Street was run by a troupe of historical re-enactors determined to stage all the classic panics of the 19th century. --Thomas Frank, WSJ (9/17/08)

Jesus H. Christ. What a baboon. Maybe you should e-mail this to Crowley. She's in the same league...

...Those huge issues aside, it seems clear that Mr. McCain's success in the Senate has been limited by his temperament in two ways. There is no question that he sometimes loses potential allies by his penchant for telling off other senators....

This was written during the 2000 campaign. (NYT)

Has anything changed?

Isn't McCain still "telling off other senators"?

Telling off aides?

Telling off reporters?

Telling off reality?

How can he argue that he was in charge of something that failed and thereby he is the person who can fix it?!?

Um, that appears to be the basic underlying argument of the entire Republican re-election campaign on virtually every issue at this point. After all, who better to get the car out of the ditch and drive it home than the drunk driver who put it there in the first place.....?

Donald A. Coffin - Well put.

I think one of the ruses is that he now actually favors some form of regulation. When I listen to what he is saying, it sounds like a familiar Republican argument. Essentially, Republicans like to argue that people (at least Americans) are 99.9% good, and that the evil-doers are not going to be reined in by laws. We just have to hunt them down and punish them. This was their argument after Abramoff and Cunningham, as with Bin Laden, Enron, gun crimes and Ray Nagen. Even Bush's voluntary submission to pollution laws, safety laws, contract bidding processes are subject to the same silly logic.

McCain also thinks he was running the Commerce Bank of Beverly Hills, and he thinks Palin is Ms. Hathaway.

The Republican campaign has turned into:

"The government is broken and we know how to fix it."

So they're admitting to slipping us poison and now they're bribing us with the antidote.

"Hi, I'm John McCain and I know how to fix the economy. I've spent years over-seeing the economy in my position on the Commerce Committee where I didn't really have any power to effect anything, but where I got to know how to do it should I ever become president.

I'm John McCain and I or someone else who I'm not coordinating with in the Republican National Committee approved this message."

I wish he had said 'McCain has spent vast sums of money in the campaign on petty attacks' etc., rather than 'this campaign has been consumed by petty attacks'. The latter obviously concedes that Obama campaign has also been engaged in petty attacks.

I don't know why Dems are so timid about stating things clearly and to the point. Don't they teach this in high school to avoid passive voice unless absolutely necessary?

"I understand the economy. I was chairman of the Commerce Committee that oversights [sic] every part of our economy."
---

Why is no one pointing out the obviously flub here? A McCain responsible for the "oversights" should have probably have seen all of the reckless deregulation first hand as the guy responsible for "oversights," and possibly he should have done something sooner.

But this is like his other pledges: Elect me and I'll fix the economy, elect me and I'll get bin Laden, elect me and I'll win this war, because you know - I know how to do all of these things; and if America puts me first then I'll put America first.

Props to Donald A. Coffin.

However, I think one reason McCain mentions "corruption" is that he has been trying for years to paint himself as a fighter of corruption. Thus, it only makes sense to frame the problem that way. He's holding a hammer, so he tells everybody that the problem is these pesky nails.

Overseas, oversaws, over-see-saws, oh what the fuck, I'm Lying!!!!!! "Keating, party of five?"

When McCain says he oversights, I think he means overlooks. Although there are plenty of oversights being made.

That's Just What I Said

Economics is in its infancy. Nobody understands economics much beyond supply and demand. Especially ignorant in this area are "economists," who generally start with a political leaning or ideology and cherry pick data to bolster their case.

McCain is just being honest.

If economic theories were valid, they would be capable of prediction. This is the test used in science. If a theory is valid, then experiments on the theory will have predictable results. In economics, unfortunately, you can't run thousands of experiments in the lab on grand theories such as free trade or supply side, and the statistics are so complex and interwoven economists can and do offer sundry interpretations depending on political leanings.

"McCain is just being honest."

About what?

About the fundamentals of the economy being strong or his position on the commerce committee conferring any meaningful experience?

Maybe he should confess that his economic mentor, Phil "Yertle the Turtle" Gramm, helped remove the primary obstacles to this kind of disaster and set the whole train wreck in motion.

P.S. On second thought, I think Yertle was the whistle-blower in that Dr. Suess tale, but I think you get the drift.

"McCain is just being honest."

About what?

About the fundamentals of the economy being strong or his position on the commerce committee conferring any meaningful experience?

Maybe he should confess that his economic mentor, Phil "Yertle the Turtle" Gramm, helped remove the primary obstacles to this kind of disaster and set the whole train wreck in motion.

P.S. On second thought, I think Yertle was the whistle-blower in that Dr. Suess tale, but I think you get the drift.

And second, if McCain really did lead a committee that "oversights [sic] every part of our economy," then wouldn't he necessarily bear some of the blame for the current mess? Indeed, shouldn't McCain be going out of his way to downplay the significance of the Commerce Committee?

There you go injecting reason into the debate again. . .

McCain is just being honest - about the fact that he oversights a lot. Quite a bit, in fact.

When people always say, "John, stop oversighting so much, you need some rest", he usually responds, "Shut up, The taxpayers pay me to oversight, so that's what I'll do - I'll farking oversight"

Standards and measurement? Great, now McCain is going to run on keeping the US off of that pansy-ass metric system.

You're making a mistake a lot of people make.

You're assuming John McCain has a brain that works.

P.S. On second thought, I think Yertle was the whistle-blower in that Dr. Suess tale

Yertle the Turtle was the turtle dictator -- the one who brought him down was "a turtle named Mack."

"The government is broken and we know how to fix it."

"So they're admitting to slipping us poison and now they're bribing us with the antidote."

Posted by: chrenson on September 17, 2008
-----------------

Blackmail is more like it!

It's not government so much as it's the Republican Party which is broken!

I don't mean the top-level politicians, campaigns and fund-raising, I mean the system by which the Republican electorate picks it's leaders. They aren't picking good leaders and this is a major problem for America.

John McCain is not the person the Republican electorate wants to be their nominee. They want Sarah Palin or Huckabee or somebody else who they see as a Christian Right Wing fundie.

John McCain is not the person America wants to be President in 2009.

"He was in the Hanoi Hilton for five and half years, dammit. He doesn't need to remember what his committee's responsibilities are, or what policies he favors."

Darn toot'n, there was a time, while being tortured!, he didn't have a committee to be ignorant of, or a house, or 7 houses, or a bathroom floor to accidentally pee on.. he had NONE of that!! all for your freedom my friends!

Geeze..

Now don't you feel low for questioning him, eh? low enough to tip toe with a witch hunter hat under a pregnant Palin.. and you long hair hippie freaks should.

In simplistic terms the main problems to date have been:

• The Greenspan asset bubble caused by a partisan Republican governor, responsible for financial oversight, creating artificially low interest rates which created a real estate asset bubble.
• More recently, the lack of federal oversight on the CDS industry. This part of finance is gigantic and un-quantified, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These insurance contracts on financial bets are an enormous culprit for today’s recent market instability. The CDS and CDO industry are unregulated at the federal level, and what regulation exists is at the state insurance level, regulated by a patchwork of groups, who do not have the knowledge to understand what they are reviewing (CDO’s and super senior tranches of CDO’s). McCain has always been a proponent of deregulation. Isn’t that a big part of what got us here?

In simplistic terms the main problems to date have been:

• The Greenspan asset bubble caused by a partisan Republican governor, responsible for financial oversight, creating artificially low interest rates which created a real estate asset bubble.
• More recently, the lack of federal oversight on the CDS industry. This part of finance is gigantic and un-quantified, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These insurance contracts on financial bets are an enormous culprit for today’s recent market instability. The CDS and CDO industry are unregulated at the federal level, and what regulation exists is at the state insurance level, regulated by a patchwork of groups, who do not have the knowledge to understand what they are reviewing (CDO’s and super senior tranches of CDO’s). McCain has always been a proponent of deregulation. Isn’t that a big part of what got us here?

In simplistic terms the main problems to date have been:

� The Greenspan asset bubble caused by a partisan Republican governor, responsible for financial oversight, creating artificially low interest rates which created a real estate asset bubble.
� More recently, the lack of federal oversight on the CDS industry. This part of finance is gigantic and un-quantified, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These insurance contracts on financial bets are an enormous culprit for today�s recent market instability. The CDS and CDO industry are unregulated at the federal level, and what regulation exists is at the state insurance level, regulated by a patchwork of groups, who do not have the knowledge to understand what they are reviewing (CDO�s and super senior tranches of CDO�s). McCain has always been a proponent of deregulation. Isn�t that a big part of what got us here?