McCain: Witness for the Prosecution

For the 9/11-like Commission he wants to study the Wall Street collapse, John McCain could well be the star witness about failure of government regulation to prevent chaos in the financial industry.

His actions as a member of the Keating Five in the 1980s, which the Senate Ethics Committee later labeled "poor judgment," were the start of two decades of McCain opposition to controlling the excesses he is now denouncing on the campaign trail.

Like the Washington insiders he is now promising to rein in, McCain took heavy campaign contributions from Savings and Loan operator Charles H. Keating, accepted free trips to Keating's Bahamas vacation retreat and saw his family turn a profit from an investment his wife and father-in-law made with Keating.

In return, McCain worked hard to delay and divert government action against Keating, who later went to jail for fraud and whose S&L bailout cost taxpayers more than $124 billion.

Now here he is in 2008, promising to reform what he was so deeply involved in and expecting voters to believe that he and Sarah Palin will ride in as mavericks to clean it all up.

In 2000, the Bush-Rove gang used a push poll about the Keating Scandal in the South Carolina primary to blemish McCain's straight-talk campaigning. Obama won't stoop to that, but voters with short memories should remember McCain's own record on corruption before swallowing his promises to shake up the way Washington does business.