McCain just obliterated the Straight Talk Express. Admits it was built on a lie.

As the stock market tanks yet again (it's down 540 points as I write this), it's only appropriate that we revisit that other banking scandal, the one John McCain had an intimate role in.

John's post below contains the stunning admission from the McCain campaign that the Keating 5 investigation was an attempt to politically smear John McCain. For years, we've been hearing that McCain's "reformer" image came from his claiming to have made amends for that scandal, which sunk 1,000 banks and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. But, now we know that McCain's reform mantle is a fraud. McCain isn't sorry for what happened. He's sorry he got caught.

McCain's many friends in the political punditry were most willing to give him a pass on the Keating scandal because they fell for the scam. Remember when the king of the pundits, David Broder, wrote last June:

McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes.

Not true. McCain actually believes that the Keating 5 scandal wasn't about his lack of ethics, it was simply a political witch hunt conducted against him by "stooges." How can McCain make amends for something when he doesn't think did anything wrong. McCain's whole reformer image is built on a lie.

McCain had a long, intimate relationship with Charles Keating. Jonathan Singer at MyDD provided a concise and informative overview of the McCain-Keating relationship last January:

McCain has done a great job of courting the media, not only over the past 8 to 10 years but throughout his entire career, and on the basis of this close relationship with the establishment press he has been able to position himself as a true champion of clean government. But is he? Is this something that Democrats should be conceding to him?

The only reason why McCain took up the mantle of campaign finance reform was that he was intimately caught up in the Keating Five corruption scandal back in the 1980s -- a scandal that could have strong legs in a general election this year even though it occurred so long ago. In short, the scandal entailed Charles Keating, the head of a Savings and Loan institution that went belly up, and the steps he took -- including trying to call in favors from Senators to whom he and associates had given trips and donated campaign money -- to try to get Congressional investigators off of his back. In an era when the federal government is faced with the possibility of having to bail out billions or even trillions in bad debt resulting from the subprime lending industry, a politician's involvement in a corruption scandal linked to a similar boondoggle -- in the case of the savings and loan crisis, the federal government picked up a tab of close to $125 billion -- isn't necessarily going to be a positive.

And just how closely was McCain tied to the Keating Five scandal? Very. Though McCain might try to downplay his involvement, his campaigns received $124,000 from Keating and his associates during the 1980s (AP, 3/2/91), and McCain was described as being personally closer to Keating than any of the other members of the Keating Five (Roll Call, 1/20/92). What's more, McCain accepted more than $15,000 in free trips from Keating, including vacations to Keating's resort in the Bahamas -- trips that McCain failed to disclose at the time (New York Times, 2/28/91; San Francisco Chronicle, 12/3/90).

McCain is not a reformer. He's a whiner -- an angry whiner. And he's also a man who just reopened the entire history of the Keating 5 scandal.