cognitive dissident

Tim Dickinson's Rolling Stone article "Make-Believe Maverick" dishes the dirt on the GOP's favorite hot-headed flip-flopper, and doesn't shy away from McCain's unsavory association with the crooked Charles Keating:

To finance his campaign, McCain dipped into the Hensley family fortune. He secured an endorsement from his mentor, Sen. Tower, who tapped his vast donor network in Texas to give McCain a much-needed boost. And he began an unethical relationship with a high-flying and corrupt financier that would come to characterize his cozy dealings with major donors and lobbyists over the years.

Charlie Keating, the banker and anti-pornography crusader, would ultimately be convicted on 73 counts of fraud and racketeering for his role in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. That crisis, much like today's subprime-mortgage meltdown, resulted from misbegotten banking deregulation, and ultimately left taxpayers to pick up a tab of more than $124 billion. Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for McCain's race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating's expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul's estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as "Charlie Keating's Shangri-La." Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.

Remember that close association between McCain and Keating, because McCain supporters are trying to make it less significant than the tangential-at-best tie between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. Palin claimed that Obama is "palling around with terrorists" based on this NYT article, but apparently her reading comprehension isn't all that it should be:

...the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called "somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8."

Despite Palin's best attempts, all the gosh-golly-gee-whillickers-you-betcha winking folksy bullshit in the world can't turn McCain's sow's-ear campaign into a silk purse. He's BFFs with too many lobbyists (Rick Davis, for example) and has too long a history of supporting the same failed policies of mindless tax-cutting and deregulation that caused much of the mess in which we now find ourselves.

The façade covering his enraged and erratic incompetence has cracked and fallen apart, and all the GOP's friends in the media can't put the pieces together again.