The Manchurian Maverick: John McCain Claims Bailout ‘Brainwash’ Victimhood
Posted on | March 1, 2010 | 19 Comments
“Barbara Espinosa must be doing a victory lap right now,” Da Tech Guy writes in reporting on how MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” battered John McCain today for claiming former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “misled” him into supporting the 2008 Wall Street bailout.
Remember that on Sept. 24, 2008 — the day Crazy Cousin John announced he would suspend his campaign and fly to D.C. to push for the bailout — my initial reaction was “Holy Crap! . . . This is insane.” Two weeks later, many Republicans excoriated me for publishing an Oct. 7 American Spectator column entited, “How John McCain Lost,” that bluntly stated the obvious:
John McCain lost the election Sept. 24 and Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. Nothing that is likely to happen between now and Nov. 4 can change this outcome. . . .
[B]y siding with the president on an issue that voters identified as favoritism toward Wall Street, the Republican cemented in the public mind a message that Team Obama had been promoting for months: A vote for McCain would mean a third term for George W. Bush. . . .
It was McCain’s outspoken support for the unpopular bailout — a big-government intervention incompatible with conservative economic philosophy — that handed the election to Obama. The bailout failed as politics and, as evidenced by Monday’s selloff on Wall Street, it also failed as policy.
McCain has no one but himself to blame for his own failure of judgment, and his attempt to scapegoat others is pure political cowardice. If Bernanke and Paulson were liars, wasn’t it McCain’s responsibility as a statesman to inform himself of their untrustworthy character and to question their advice? It’s time to rid the U.S. Senate of the one man most responsible for the Obama presidency.
Enjoy your retirement, cuz!
MORE READING:
- J.D. Hayworth vs. John McCain
- Michelle Malkin: “Attention, GOP: John McCain Is the Problem”
- Robert Costa, National Review: The Double Talk Express
- Politico: John McCain “desperation” smear of Hayworth
- American Spectator: John McCain Offers to Campaign for Charlie Crist
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