McCain the Scam-Stealer

Obviously Senator McCain, as the time to declare his candidacy nears, has begun to take on a certain feverish stench. I wish I could call that odor garlic. But no, I'm afraid it's more in the fecal category. It's almost as tough to attend to reports of his statements and actions if you have any belief in the goodness of our species as it is to watch a Bush speech (see prior post). At least in public I believe he has confined himself to embraces and lip contact with George - no actual fondling or disrobing. But his absolutely disgusting pandering and shilling on behalf of the nonelected non-duty-serving unpatriotic Mr. Bush has been pretty appalling lately. Well that's too kind. It's actually sick and disgusting that his behavior has not been more widely sanctioned. He's not even on my Mr. Charming list anymore.

And of course he's so much a part of the republican party chorus that you have to wonder if the repukelican talking points are being fed to him by some implanted receiver.

But even knowing all of that, it is still pretty astonishing that he is already playing the same phantasmagoric "I didn't know that those were my feet down there below my knees" scam that George tried the other day on the subject of apocalypse (op cit).

This is also yet another sorry indictment of the corporate media, having let McCain's hiring of a staffer with potentially criminal (and definitely compromising) ties to DeLay and other Republican Party scandals go by with nary a comment. Folks like Tim Russert, already famous shills for and suckups to the powers that be, have let this slide. Of course that is why anyone who wants to know what of consequence is going on in the real world does not look to Meet the Press and the like. You might as well count on People magazine.

But the good news is that the citizenry can overcome all of this MI/Media Complex crap, much as water will find a way through. Josh Marshall among others has been championing this issue, and his widespread connections have yielded some results:

TPM Reader AT on John McCain finally getting asked about why he hired a new 'senior advisor' who's implicated in two of the biggest campaign corruption scandals of recent years ...

Actually the saddest thing about the whole Nelson thing is that it took a random person calling into a talk-show in Seattle before someone actually asked [McCain] about the whole thing. How many times has he been interviewed or questioned since he hired Nelson? And how many times has the press asked these types of questions? Zero. Where's Tim Russert? Oh that's right, fawning over Mr. Straight-talk.

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Late Update: Just to keep everyone in the loop, here's the exchange the Seattle caller had with Sen. McCain ...

CALLER: Thanks, I had a question for the senator. For a reformer, I'm kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor. Here's a guy who was actually in the indictment of DeLay on his money laundering charges. When he was at the RNC, he agreed to take the corporate contributions from DeLay's PAC and then recycle them back into the Republican congressional races.

And he was also, this guy Nelson was also the supervisor of James Tobin, who was the guy convicted last year for helping jam the Democratic get-out-the-vote lines in New England a couple years ago.

So I'm curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?

MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.

CALLER: You don't believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?

MCCAIN: No.

CARLSON: All right.

[nervous laughter]

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Needless to say, what the caller said was precisely true, as you can see demonstrated in this post about the DeLay case and this one about the phone-jamming case.