So Jim Johnson, from Sen. Obama's VP search committee, is the subject of a Wall Street Journal article suggesting that he got below market average loans from Countrywide with the direct support of its ethically-challenged CEO  Angelo Mozilo under an unofficial program not readily available through your local mortgage broker (unless your local mortgage broker is Angelo Mozilo).  Well, yeah, perhaps a little distasteful, especially given Johnson had been CEO of Fannie Mae prior to this and was therefore the biggest buyer of mortgages.  Unsurprisingly, the Obama campaign called the foofaraw "overblown and irrelevant."  Speaking as a strong Obama supporter and long-time professional watcher of banking markets, this could possibly smell a bit, though in fairness I'd point out that anyone in a position to take out $7 million in mortgages had damn well better have an above-average FICO score.

That being said, sublime irony below the fold.

Recently John McCain has been not too subtly insinuating that Barack Obama has ties to terrorist groups, by making the false and completely irrelevant claim that Barack Obama has been endorsed by Hamas.  In doing so, McCain has been contradicting his previous pledge to run a respectful campaign.  

McCain Forecloses Early

By GAIL COLLINS
Published: March 29, 2008
I don’t see how anybody could deny that John McCain is a straight-talker. The country is terrified of economic collapse and he’s been sounding like Mr. Potter, the banker in "It’s a Wonderful Life." You can’t get more forthright than that.

The theme for his mortgage speech this week was basically McCain to Homeowners: Drop Dead. It was, he said sternly, "not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly." The good news, he noted, was that out of 80 million American homeowners, only 4 million are in the tank, while everybody else is "working a second job, skipping a vacation and managing their budgets" the way Countrywide Financial intended them to.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

Al Gore was called a serial exagerator for less, but since the NY Times story broke a week ago, there have been a steady parade of steadfast denials from the McCain campaign only to be followed up by "misstatements, "clarifications," and "corrections" that are equally factually challenged.

Did you hear the one where McCain never had a meeting with Bud Paxson? How about that he one that he had never met Bill Cunningham? Wait. Did you hear the one about how McCain admits that he has no chance of winning unless he can convince the electorate that we are 'winning" in Iraq?

We hear repeatedly that mcCain did not suffer any substantive sanctions from the Senate Ethics Committee in 1989-90 from his actions as a member of the "Keating Five," a term retroactively applied to five U.S. Senators who received significant campaign contributions from the Phoenix-based American Continental Corporation chair Charles Keating - in Keating's words - to persuade them to aid him in avoiding federal oversight in his stewardship of depositor money at Lincoln Savings & Loan in Irvine, CA.

This is true as far as it goes. However, the implication is that McCain was no different from the other Senators - John Glenn, Dennis DeConcini, Alan Cranston and Don Reigle. This really wasn't the case.

As we all read yesterday, the campaign of Senator John McCain issued a stunningly absolutist non-denial denial about allegations (and, honestly, it seem silly to call them “allegations” when there is so much documentation) that the AZ Asshole’s close ties to lobbyists have led to all sorts of improprieties. While I took great issue with the campaign’s assertion that McCain “has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests,” I have to give them credit for one possible truism:

[T]here is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.

Just hours before the New York Times went live with a story that shines an especially bright light on John McCain’s unseemly, suspicious, overly close ties to Washington lobbyists (especially one Vicki Iseman), McCain took time to send out a very special e-mail to his supporters (in the e-mail, the line that I bolded links to a donation page that includes the same paragraph above.):

While I am confident of the eventual outcome of this primary race - the stakes are too high to take the nomination for granted. There are still more primaries, there are still three of us competing for the nomination and I am still working night and day to make sure that we have the funds necessary to compete and win the remaining state primaries.

Working night and day to make sure you have the funds? Is that how you spend your time, John? Not legislating, or voting, or even campaigning? You work night and day for campaign contributions? Why Johnny, we had no idea. . .

Except, of course, we all did.

[Edited to reflect a slightly more realistic world view - L.L.]

A lot of cyber-ink has already been spilled on this evening's New York Times piece on McCain and Vicki Iseman.  I wanted to take a moment to focus attention on an extremely curious passage from the McCain campaign's press release responding to the article.  

Here's the line from the release that grabbed my attention:  

"John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity."

Let's unpack this for a minute.

When it comes to having good judgment, John McCain certainly has had his lapses.  Whether it was his tremendous leadership during Hurricane Katrina or it is his flip flop and double talk with respect to his own campaign finances, or whether it is his pandering to the very people that he railed against and who sold him down the river a few years back or whether it is losing his temper to his own republican colleagues in the Senate, the list is long.

But the most notable is the background behind McCain’s "transformation" on campaign finance reform – his relationship with Charles Keating, his wife’s relationship with Keating, the financial entanglement between the McCains and Keating and the $2.3 billion that We the People paid to bailout Lincoln Savings & Loan as a result.

Those of us who live in Arizona have had a front-row seat in a series of McCain scandals -- his affair with a young heiress while married to the wife who raised his three children while he was a POW, his carpetbagging move to Arizona to begin his political career with his new wife's money and connections, the influencing-peddling of the Keating Five in the S&L collapse, and the DEA investigation that revealed that his wife had stolen drugs from a charity she ran to feed her addiction.  Those incidents were certainly reprehensible, but what bothers me more is the vengeful and nasty way he handled the problem with his wife's drug addiction.