John McCain likes to say he has often crossed the aisle and worked with Democratic Senators.
And it is true.
In fact I can think of one famous example of him working with 4 Democratic Senators: The Keating Five
The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Four of the Senators were Democrats, but always the maverick, Republican Sen. McCain wanted in.
Gray [former chief of the Federal Home Loan Ban Board (FHLBB)] testified that several U.S. senators had approached him and requested that he ease off on the Lincoln investigation.
...
McCain received $112,000 by 1987 from Keating and Keating's relatives and employees to McCain's Senate campaign, more than any of the other Senators.
And yes there were expensive jet rides and vacations that McCain forgot to pay for until things started getting hot. Scandal aside, the Savings and Loan collapse should sound very familiar to you.
Regulations on Savings and Loans relaxed in the 80s and suddenly the Savings and Loans started getting into risky real estate ventures. And, of course, it all fell apart and Savings and Loans all over the nation started to fail. In the end the US government had to step in and bail out the Savings and Loans to the tune of $124 billion. Hell its just your tax dollars being used to clean up the messes of the super rich, you should be used to it.
Here's one rich kid who was a Director of a Savings and Loan. His failure of management cost the tax payers of this nation $1.6 billion. The government found that this rich kid had engaged in numerous "breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest." But don't worry he wasn't charged with anything, eventually he did lose $50,000 to make the whole legal issue go away. The rich kid was Neil Bush. Son of then VP G.H.W. Bush and brother of our current pResident Bush.
Now Neil is a Millionaire whose company gets a lot of business from the Department of Education and McCain is running for President, so when you look today at these folks who are presently bringing down huge brokerages and banks with bad loans, incompetent management, and some shady dealing know that in the long run there won't be any repercussions for them.
They aren't like you and me. We pay for our mistakes. And we also pay for their mistakes.
They just float above us and wonder why we don't like the scraps they leave for us... God we're such whiners (why I'd even say we're a nation of whiners).
McCain still floats above it all and the world doesn't touch him:
The Week That Should Have Ended McCain's Presidential Hopes
During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made -- TWICE. All this and it is not even Friday! Yet watching and reading the mainstream press you would think McCain was having a pretty decent political week, I mean at least Jesse Jackson didn't say anything about him.
Cross posted at my site This Century Sucks, but if you can't share a rambling post that spans twenty five years with the folks at DKos, what can you share?