Our Ms. Brooks: ZOMG!!!1!! She said Keating 5!!!1!!

It was really satisfying to see a columnist daring to say "Keating 5" out loud (or, in this case, in print), and Rosa Brooks did just that here. Most pundits outside the blogoverse have been assiduously avoiding bringing up that nasty bit of business from the 1980s, but that history is especially pertinent right now. Let's start with Ms. Brooks brief historical summary.

Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association. The contributions were generous: They came to about $200,000 in today's dollars, and on top of that there were several free vacations for the politician and his family, along with private jet trips and other perks. The politician voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of S&Ls, and in 1987, when he learned that his constituent's S&L was the target of a federal investigation, he met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

That politician was John McCain, and his generous friend was Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. While he was courting McCain and other senators and urging them to oppose tougher regulation of S&Ls, Keating was also investing his depositors' federally insured savings in risky ventures. When those lost money, Keating tried to hide the losses from regulators by inducing his customers to switch from insured accounts to uninsured (and worthless) bonds issued by Lincoln's near-bankrupt parent company. In 1989, it went belly up -- and more than 20,000 Lincoln customers saw their savings vanish. ...

...the savings and loan crisis mushroomed. Eventually, the government spent about $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to bail out hundreds of failed S&Ls that, like Keating's, fell victim to a combination of private-sector greed and the "poor judgment" of politicians like McCain.

So the young senator was rebuked by his peers and got to continue in his day job as US Senator from Arizona. Hey, 20,000 is a relatively small number, right?

That was then. So what did the senator learn from this experience? Well, not a whole helluva lot.

But, despite his political near-death experience as a member of the Keating Five, McCain continued to champion deregulation, voting in 2000, for instance, against federal regulation of the kind of financial derivatives at the heart of today's crisis.

Shades of the Keating Five scandal don't end there. This week, for instance, news broke that until August, the lobbying firm owned by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac, one of the mortgage giants implicated in the current crisis (now taken over by the government and under investigation by the FBI). Apparently, Freddie Mac's plan was to gain influence with McCain's campaign in hopes that he would help shield it from pesky government regulations. And until very recently, Freddie Mac executives probably figured money paid to Davis' firm was money well spent. "I'm always in favor of less regulation," McCain told the Wall Street Journal in March. [Emphasis added]

And here we are in the waning days of September, and this time more than a million people are facing foreclosure, and millions more are watching their retirement nest eggs shoved rudely out of the nest. No wonder Sen. McCain suggested cancelling tonight's debate. I mean, it could get downright embarrassing under those klieg lights, eh?

A dishonest man, a moron, and a coward: that's what the GOP is offering as their presidential candidate.