McCain: Change You Can Believe I Came Up With Yesterday

John McCain, the Keating Five Guy, to lead us into a new era of bailouts. Or, as the WaPo puts it:

McCain Embraces Regulation After Many Years of Opposition

A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.

Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation's largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end "reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed" on Wall Street.

Think Progress has an awesome collection of the iron message discipline of the McCain campaign as it tries to rewrite history:

Here is a look at McCain’s back-and-forth on regulation during the last 24 hours:

- Deregulation: McCain issued a statement Monday morning saying that “we cannot tolerate a system that handicaps our markets and our banks.”

- Regulation: McCain’s campaign then put out an ad calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street.”

- Deregulation: This morning, on NBC’s Today Show, McCain said, “Of course, I don’t like excessive and unnecessary government regulation.”

- Regulation: Then, on CBS’s The Early Show, McCain said, “Do I believe in excess government regulation? Yes.”

- Both: On CNBC’s Squawk Box, McCain said, “We don’t want to burden average citizens with over-regulation and government bureaucracy...And I’m proud to be a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, who said, ‘unfettered capitalism leads to corruption,’ and we’ve got to fix this.”

This gets back to McCain's dependency on fiscal advisors that call Americans whiners (Phil Gramm, the architect of McCain's deregulation scheme) and exaggerators (Donald Luskin), and, more importantly, that McCain doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to the economy ("Economy is not my strong point.")

Which he's just demonstrated. Again.