Among the more telling details in the Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz Monday was a nugget about the McCain campaign's retaliation against New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. McCain aides, he wrote, "have barred Dowd from the candidate's plane." But if that petulance provides a window into John McCain's soul, his 1998 interview with Dowd about his slanderous Chelsea Clinton joke was more revealing still.

As David Corn reported in Salon, John McCain back in 1998 used the occasion of a Republican Senate fundraiser to slander President Clinton's daughter and attorney general. Following in the proud tradition of Rush Limbaugh (who in 1993 called the young Chelsea "a dog"), Mr.Straight Talk joked:

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."

As Maureen Dowd rightly predicted at the time, Senator McCain's vulgar slur produced no backlash, as he "so revered by the press that his disgusting jape was largely nudged under the rug."

But McCain's response to Dowd provides a telling glimpse into the character of the man who would succeed George W. Bush as the next Republican president. In their phone interview, McCain brushed off his grotesque insult as the equivalent of a rambunctious teenager egging a neighbor's house:

''This is the bad boy,'' he said in a phone interview. ''It was stupid and cruel and insensitive. I've apologized. I can't take it back. I could give you a whole bunch of excuses, but there are no excuses. I was wrong, but do you want me crucified? How many days does it need to be a story?''

He said the Senator who spoke just before he did to the Republican fat cats made a tasteless joke about Viagra. ''So I got up and said, 'You think that was a tasteless joke? Listen to this one.' The minute it came out of my mouth, I thought, 'Oh no, this is a terrible mistake.'''

But, he added, defensively, ''I will always maintain a sense of humor. Life is too short not to.''

Apparently, John McCain has since lost his sense of humor. And while Dowd, whatever her merits or demerits, lost her battle to stay on the Straight Talk Express, John McCain's war on the New York Times will no doubt continue.

Faced with the prospect of a woman or African-American opponent in the 2008 presidential race, the Republican Party back in February initiated diversity training of sorts. The RNC commissioned focus groups and polls to learn how to safely attack either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton because, as GOP strategist Kellyanne Conway put it, "You can't allow the party to be Macaca-ed." Sadly for the Party of Hate, top Republican officials in Nevada and New Mexico didn't read the memo.

Over the weekend, the GOP removed Didi Lima, its communications director in Clark County, Nevada. Both the Republicans' spokesperson for the most populous county in the state and co-chair for John McCain's Nevada Hispanic Leadership Team, Lima on Thursday failed to exercise what Conway earlier deemed "less deafness and more deftness in dealing with a different looking candidate." As USA Today reported:

"We don't want (Hispanics) to become the new African-American community," Lima told The Associated Press. "And that's what the Democratic Party is going to do to them, create more programs and give them handouts, food stamps and checks for this and checks for that. We don't want that."

"I'm very much afraid that the Democratic Party is going to do the same thing that they did with the African-American culture and make them all dependent on the government and we don't want that," she said.

Lima's departure follows on the heels of the resignation last week of Fernando C. de Baca. Chairman of the Republican Party in Bernalillo County, New Mexico's most populous county, de Baca predicted John McCain would do well in his state:

"The truth is that Hispanics came here as conquerors. African-Americans came here as slaves. Hispanics consider themselves above blacks. They won't vote for a black president."

As the national and state polls clearly show, de Baca is wrong. Obama has enjoyed leads as large as 40 points among Hispanic voters nationwide. And for now, the battleground state of New Mexico is leaning his way.

Sadly, Lima and de Baca's missteps in the Southwest are hardly isolated events for the Republican Party in this year's election. On Thursday, Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachman cited an article blaming "blacks" and "other minorities" for the Wall Street financial crisis. In Virginia, Congressman Virgil Goode, who previously hurled anti-Muslim slurs at his Minnesota colleague Keith Ellison, is airing ads depicting his lily-white Democratic opponent as dark-skinned and bearded. Meanwhile, Fort Hill, South Carolina mayor Danny Funderburk forwarded an email proclaiming Barack Obama the anti-Christ because he was "just curious" if it was true.

And it's not even October yet.

As I wrote last year ("The Party of Hate"), "the only message seemingly uniting Republicans is disdain - of immigrants, of blacks, of gay Americans and above all, Muslims." Alas, Kellyanne Conway's diversity training for Republicans was just a smokescreen for the Party of Hate.

On Saturday night Sarah Palin once again put John McCain in a tough spot, this time on the subject of Pakistan. Just hours after McCain blasted Barack Obama for saying "out loud" that the U.S. should - if necessary - unilaterally strike at Al Qaeda targets along Pakistan's western border, Palin in essence agreed with the Illinois Democrat. Of course, McCain himself never followed his rule that you don't announce possible American military action "ahead of time." As it turns out, John McCain in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks said early and often that Iraq should be an American target.

ZAHN: And as you know, Senator, the U.S. and Great Britain notified the U.N. Security Council yesterday that they reserve the right to strike against other countries in this campaign. What countries are we looking at?

MCCAIN: Well, I think very obviously Iraq is the first country, but there are others -- Syria, Iran, the Sudan, who have continued to harbor terrorist organizations and actually assist them.

In case there was any lingering confusion about McCain's intentions, he erased all doubt on January 2, 2002. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt over a year before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, McCain yelled to a crowd of sailors and airmen:

"Next up, Baghdad!"

And to be sure, John McCain wasn't shy about to trying to manufacture a pretext for the assault against Saddam he repeatedly advertised. In the wake of the anthrax attacks in the U.S. in the fall of 2001, McCain was quick to suggest Iraq might be behind them. Appearing on the David Letterman show on October 18, 2001, McCain suggested that the anthrax incidents augured a "second phase" in the war on terror, this time against Baghdad:

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we're doing fine...I think we'll do fine. The second phase - if I could just make one, very quickly - the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may - and I emphasize may - have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that's when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

McCain has been firing salvos at Barack Obama for months over Obama's August 1, 2007 declaration that "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." Sadly for McCain, that approach became the policy of the United States government by January 2008, as the Bush administration stepped up strikes against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan using unmanned Predator drones. Worse still for McCain, the Pentagon's top commanders, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen and commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, concurred with Obama's assessment both that more troops were needed there and that they could only come from Iraq.

Neither his past statements on Iraq nor the reality on the ground in Afghanistan prevented McCain from launching his same tired broadside during the debate on Friday:

"Now, you don't do that. You don't say that out loud. If you have to do things, you have to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government...

...I guarantee you I would not publicly state that I'm going to attack them."

For his part, Barack Obama on Friday made clear that "nobody talked about attacking Pakistan" and that ''if the United States has al Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out."

Sadly for John McCain, on Saturday Sarah Palin agreed with Obama about the Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens ensconced within the territory of America's problematic ally, Pakistan:

"If that's what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should."

In response today, John McCain recanted Palin's words for her during an appearance on ABC This Week with George Stephanopolous. After first claiming that "sticking a microphone" in Sarah Palin's face did not produce "definitive policy statement" by her, McCain announced:

"[Palin] understands and has stated repeatedly that we're not going to do anything except in America's national security interest, and we are not going to, quote, 'announce it ahead of time.'"

Unless, of course, the country is Iraq and you're John McCain.

UPDATE 1: On Monday, September 29, McCain told Katie Couric during a joint interview with Sarah Palin, "Gov. Palin and I agree that you don't announce that you're going to attack another country."

UPDATE 2: Iran, too, has been an object of John McCain's premature emancipation. In October 2007, John McCain told a GOP debate audience that the prospect of U.S. strikes against Tehran "is a possibility that is maybe closer to reality than we are discussing tonight." At an event that April, McCain jokingly sang "bomb bomb Iran." Then this July, he kidded about cigarettes as "a way of killing them." Still, none of those statements prevented McCain from airing an ad in June proclaiming, "only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war." Even in jest, John McCain's decidedly unpresidential temperament makes him unfit for command.

Simon's hagiographic treatment of McCain didn't start this week. After the Republican convention earlier this month, Simon regurgitated the talking points emanating from McCain Central:

John McCain is a maverick who has now done what mavericks almost never do: win. And now he must lead a party while maintaining his independence from it.

It's a dilemma, but McCain attempted to resolve it by facing it head on. "I don't work for a party," he said. "I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you."

Then as the economic crisis threatened to undermine the Republican's campaign, Simon praised McCain for "shooting craps" in trying to appropriate the Wall Street meltdown for his own political purposes:

John McCain is now shooting craps with his presidential campaign. It is high risk. But all he needs is a little luck to pull off his current gamble.

McCain has suspended his campaign to work on a solution for the nation's financial meltdown, and he has threatened to pull out of the first presidential debate scheduled for Friday unless Congress takes action by then.

McCain has been attacked from all sides for doing this, but it isn't as dumb or as desperate as it looks.

Then came Friday's debate. While CNN and CBS post-event surveys showed a marked advantage for Obama among undecided viewers, commentators across the political spectrum scoffed at McCain's childish refusal to look his opponent in the eye. But for Politico's fawning Simon, McCain's victory was clear, his churlishness a positive:

John McCain was very lucky that he decided to show up for the first presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., Friday night. Because he gave one of his strongest debate performances ever.

While Barack Obama repeatedly tried to link McCain to the very unpopular George W. Bush, Bush's name will not be on the ballot in November and McCain's will.

And McCain not only found a central theme but hit on it repeatedly. Obama is inexperienced, naive, and just doesn't understand things, McCain said...

...McCain seemed to be enjoying himself. He smiled a lot, mostly when Obama was talking, though his smile was really more like a smirk.

Simon started his laudatory piece on McCain's gamble Thursday by explaining, "I have watched John McCain shoot craps for hours" and that "craps is his favorite casino game." Sadly for John McCain and Roger Simon, Sunday's New York Times featured an article which began with an almost identical description of McCain's gambler past. That story, which may well dominate discussion on Monday, was titled, "McCain and Team Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry."

In the recent teen film Superbad, a young nerd hopes to obtain alcohol and girls with a comically bogus driver's license identifying him only as "McLovin." This past week, Roger Simon offered a similarly feeble impression of a journalist. McLovin, indeed.

UPDATE 1: The Times' Frank Rich provides a compare-and-contrast with Simon on McCain's pathetic posturing.

UPDATE 2: In his defense, on September 4th Simon penned a scathing critique of McCain's war on the press titled, "Why the Media Should Apologize."

Friday's first presidential debate may well be best remembered for the unique combination of cowardice displayed by the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin. Unlike Barack Obama, John McCain couldn't look his opponent in the eye during the contest. And unlike Joe Biden, Sarah Palin wouldn't look into television cameras after.

McCain's childish refusal to even acknowledge Obama's presence immediately struck commentators doing the event post-mortem. On MSNBC, Richard Wolfe noted that McCain "curiously couldn't look Obama in the eye." In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson pointed out that McCain's "aggression came with a smirk and a sneer." The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, too, observed that the Republican literally couldn't face the man he repeatedly tried to attack:

"McCain did not filter himself, letting his frustration and contempt for Obama show; he wouldn't let himself look at the challenger."

Of course, many will write off the 90 minute display of petulance as just McCain being McCain, this time wrestling with his demons in front of 100 million people nationwide. Regardless, that "McCain seemed contemptuous of Obama" (to quote Robinson) was sadly expected, a display attributed perhaps to McCain's arrogance, impatience and legendary temper.

But Americans at least got to see McCain's temperament - disturbing as it was - on their screens last night. Sarah Palin was nowhere to be seen.

As soon as Obama and McCain finished their match-up in Mississippi, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden appeared on almost every network. The omnipresent Biden made Palin's absence from the airwaves all the more glaring.

That Governor Palin was a no-show was inexcusable, but not surprising. (That she merely watched the debate in a bar in Philadelphia only makes matters worse.) After all, the handful of times the stealth candidate emerged from her undisclosed location has proven disastrous for the Republicans. While her appearance with ABC's Charles Gibson was merely embarrassing, her interview with CBS' Katie Couric was a catastrophe. The GOP's fear and loathing was best captured Friday by Kathleen Parker of the reliably Republican National Review. Palin, she said, was "out of her league" and should drop out of the race.

Discretion, so it said, is the better part of valor. Sadly, in McCain's case, he showed no discretion at all. As for Palin, her cowardice was clear; she didn't show up at all.

As he shows time and again, the only thing in life as certain as death and taxes is John McCain addressing Americans as "my friends." But just as predictable during tonight's first presidential debate was McCain's recycling of his tried and untrue talking points in the face of his horrendous track record on Iraq.

Almost on cue, McCain regurgitated his past sound bite that about the surge and Barack Obama that "I was right, he was wrong."

Sadly, when it comes to the war in Iraq, it is the Arizona Republican who failed his own commander-in-chief test. At almost every turn in the run-up to the invasion and the ensuing American occupation, McCain's judgment was almost always wrong, often disastrously so. From his predictions of a short war, claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that the U.S. would find weapons of mass destruction to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over Sunni and Shiite, friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, John McCain the would-be wartime president gets failing marks.

Here, then, is a look back at John McCain's reign of error on Iraq:

As John McCain heads to Mississippi for the presidential debate he held hostage for the past two days, his cynical ploy is being panned across the political spectrum. While Chris Dodd blasted the Republican's bungled bailout intervention as "a rescue plan for John McCain," GOP colleague Mike Huckabee called it simply a "huge mistake." Sadly, McCain's self-proclaimed white knight role is now a sadly familiar routine. Down in the polls and facing a national crisis exposes him at his weakest, John McCain suspends his campaign and declares the issue must be taken "out of politics." In a nutshell, McCain's pathetic modus operandi is our pain, his gain.

McCain's response to the approach of Hurricane Gustav provides a case in point. In the wake of the Democratic convention, Barack Obama enjoyed a bounce that gave him an 8% cushion in the polls. Worse still, Gustav was due to make landfall within days of the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which coincidentally was McCain's 72nd birthday. That national tragedy provided not only the defining domestic failure of the Bush administration, but produced the enduring image of the President and McCain sharing birthday cake on an Arizona tarmac even as Katrina devastated New Orleans.

And so McCain's manipulation of the Hurricane Gustav crisis began. As Politico reported on August 30:

McCain made plans to travel to a threatened area of the Gulf Coast on Sunday, accompanied by his wife, Cindy, and running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. They planned to meet Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour in Jackson, Miss., aides said.

McCain was scheduled to deliver his acceptance speech Thursday, but now may do so from the devastation zone if the storm hits the U.S. coast with the ferocity feared by forecasters.

The next day, McCain's grandstanding continued, as he and Palin received a briefing at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Then, McCain issued a statement designed to place himself above mere partisan politics:

"I pledge that tomorrow night, and if necessary, throughout our convention if necessary, to act as Americans not Republicans, because America needs us now no matter whether we are Republican or Democrat."

As it turned out, McCain's call to "take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats" paid huge dividends. The debut of Sarah Palin erased quickly Obama's bump. As Politico's Roger Simon gushed yesterday, "McCain essentially suspended the first day of the Republican National Convention because of Hurricane Gustav, and while some thought that was a dumb overreaction, it actually gave him a perfect excuse to cancel appearances by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney." Only Cindy McCain's $300,000 outfit on the first night in St. Paul tarnished an otherwise wildly successful gambit.

Fast forward to the Wall Street meltdown. Once again, John McCain tried to profit from national tragedy, this time as American families saw their homes and life savings jeopardized.

McCain's attempt to grab the spotlight as the nonpartisan hero followed a catastrophic week for him as the campaign shifted to his Achilles' heel, the economy. His pronouncement that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong," his 24 hour reversal on the AIG rescue, his bizarre idea for a 9/11-style commission and his unconstitutional call for the firing of SEC chairman Chris Cox battered his campaign - and his standing in the polls.

So in dire political trouble, McCain on Wednesday declared the financial crisis beyond politics. Pretending to suspend his campaign and threatening to skip Friday's debate, McCain would return to Washington where he and he alone would broker a bipartisan solution to the looming implosion of Wall Street:

"It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem. We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved."

Despite having played no role in the negotiations between the White House and Congress in crafting a compromise on the $700 billion bailout package, McCain on Thursday put himself in the spotlight:

"I'm an old Navy pilot, and I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck," he said. "That's the situation in Washington at this very hour, when the whole future of the American economy is in danger. I cannot carry on a campaign as though this dangerous situation had not occurred, or as though a solution were at hand."

This time, though, it looks at though McCain won't get away with it. Editorial boards blasted McCain's theatrics as just that. Democrats blamed McCain for scuttling the tentative agreement reached earlier Thursday. And news outlets including CNN, CBS and the New York Times reported that McCain sat largely silent during the White House meeting in which House Republicans unraveled the consensus reached without his involvement. In the end, McCain backed down from his debate threat. As Republican consultant Craig Shirley put it, "he blinked and Obama did not."

Bill Clinton famously used to say that he "shared our pain." Now, after his outrageously self-aggrandizing performance this week, it's John McCain's turn.

While the post-mortem on Thursday's collapse of the bipartisan Wall Street bailout deal is still being written, one aspect of John McCain's double-dealing is beyond dispute. According to campaign mouthpieces Tucker Bounds and Lindsey Graham, John McCain is responsible both for moving the $700 billion compromise package forward and for killing it.

That act of political schizophrenia took only hours to accomplish. Early Thursday, Democrats led by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) announced that a consensus deal had been reached. That package featured concessions by President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson on CEO pay, equity shares for taxpayers, mortgage assistance and phased funding.

And despite the fact that the preliminary agreement occurred before John McCain even arrived in Washington Thursday, his spokesman Tucker Bounds claimed his man deserved the credit for it. Though McCain played no role in the Dodd/Franks initiative then on the brink of success, Bounds declared:

"Before John McCain suspended his campaign yesterday, the situation that we're looking at today looked very different then. After he showed leadership and called for bipartisanship, for us to partisanship aside and tackle this solution head on, here we are."

But by Thursday evening, the accord lay in ruins. Thanks to the combined incoherence of John McCain and the intransigence of House Republicans, the deal struck between the White House and Senate leaders of both parties was scuttled. According to his water carrier Lindsey Graham (R-SC), what John McCain giveth, John McCain taketh away. As Politico detailed Thursday night:

Sen. Lindsey Graham - one of John McCain's closest Senate allies - just told reporters at the Capitol: "The Paulson plan is dead."

It wasn't clear whether Graham meant the $700 billion plan Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson proposed earlier this week or the modified, compromise plan congressional negotiators came up with Thursday afternoon. But no matter -- Graham said both plans are "going nowhere."

As the talks broke down in Washington, Marc Ambinder's prediction - that McCain would try to bolster his populist façade by opposing the very deal he exerted such pressure to see produced seemed to be coming to pass. The McCain campaign issued a statement declaring:

"The plan that has been put forth by the administration does not enjoy the confidence of the American people as it will not protect the taxpayers and will sacrifice Main Street in favor of Wall Street."

And so it is that John McCain might yet hit the trifecta with what most observers rightly deemed a political stunt. As with the AIG rescue, McCain's just-in-time reversal will incur him no penalty. As with Hurricane Gustav and the GOP convention, McCain will try to take politics out of an area of glaring weakness for him and his Republican Party. And despite his transparently cynical ploy in threatening to skip Friday's debate, John McCain will once again claim to be the white knight, the hero of main street America.

With each passing day, Sarah Palin's handling of TrooperGate grows more and more reminiscent of George W. Bush's management of the PlameGate affair. President Bush, after all, in October 2003 proclaimed "I want to know the truth" about who outed covert CIA operative Valerie Plame and promised to fire anyone in his administration responsible. Now, after pledging in July that voters should "hold me accountable" in the dubious firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, Sarah Palin like Bush before her is adopting the "ongoing investigation" evasion.

That's the message coming from the McCain campaign. As CNN reported Wednesday, not only is Palin refusing to cooperate with the Alaska legislature's probe she once promised to assist, the McCain camp has now declared a cone of silence over the entire affair. As ThinkProgress summarized:

McCain campaign officials said yesterday that "they are done answering questions" about Sarah Palin's firing of Alaska's former Public Safety Commissioner. Palin's lawyers have agreed to "general parameters of immediate cooperation" with the investigation she requested from the state Personnel Board, which hired Anchorage lawyer Timothy Petumenos to conduct the inquiry. Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton said the state investigator has "asked to keep things confidential, so we will respect those wishes."

"The governor waived confidentiality, and Mr. Petumenos has just stated as of this moment that he would like for things to remain confidential," Stapleton said. "So that is why we are telling you as of today, we are no longer going to be discussing aspects of this as directed by Mr. Petumenos."

If that line sounds familiar, it should. As the revelations mounted in the fall of 2003 regarding the Bush administration's payback against Valerie and Joe Wilson over the President's bogus claims of Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, the White House shut down inquiries from the press with its ubiquitous "ongoing investigation" talking point.

By mid-2005, as the investigation by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was closing in on Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, President Bush and his hand-puppet Scott McClellan had perfected the "ongoing investigation" stonewall. While Bush himself on July 13, 2005 announced "We're in the midst of an ongoing investigation and I will be more than happy to comment further once the investigation is completed," it was McClellan who two days earlier offered the purest - and most comical - rendering of the same dodge:

"Terry, I appreciate your question. I think your question is being asked relating to some reports that are in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation. The criminal investigation that you reference is something that continues at this point. And as I've previously stated, while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it. The President directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, we made a decision that we weren't going to comment on it while it is ongoing."

The rest, as they say, is history. Bush, who on October 7, 2003 said, "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official," commuted Libby's sentence in the PlameGate affair. As for McClellan, the former press secretary emerged from his persistent vegetative state to author a tell-all book about his duplicity - and gullibility - in the service of the Bush White House.

And now with Sarah Palin and TrooperGate, history is seemingly repeating itself. As Marx famously said, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." If the American people let her get away with it, that farce could be the Vice President of the United States.

In a piece titled simply, "McCain Loses His Head," a horrified Will made the case that McCain's out-of-control temper, festering personal grudges, "impulsive" reactions and "boiling moralism" constituted a worrisome "a harbinger of a McCain presidency":

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

As it turns out, McCain's same "childish reflex" was on display 20 years ago during the Keating Five imbroglio that almost ended his career.

Denial. McCain's refusal to confront the realities of the failing Bush economy has long roots and was again on display last Monday. McCain, who has frequently described the economic slowdown as "psychological," for at least the 18th time proclaimed the "fundamentals of our economy are strong." As the Dow plummeted over 500 points, McCain reacted to the white-hot crisis on Wall Street by comically announcing his support for a 9/11-style commission to study the causes of and make recommendations to address the meltdown. Willing to kick the can down the road with his since forgotten 9/11 panel idea, McCain also took a head-in-the-sand position in opposing the government rescue of teetering insurance giant AIG:

"We cannot have the taxpayers bail out AIG or anybody else."

Anger. Sadly, McCain's denial of the obvious produced an immediate backlash from the press and the public alike. Literally within hours last Monday, McCain reversed course on the underlying strength of the American economy and declared the fundamentals of the economy to be "at great risk."

Then John McCain did what he does best - he got mad. (Unsurprisingly, McCain also launched a furious tirade in response to accusations 20 years ago about his Keating Five role during the last U.S. financial catastrophe.) Redefining "economic fundamentals" to refer the U.S. work force, McCain blasted his "opponents" for slandering American workers. By mid-week, McCain found a convenient - if unconstitutional - target for his rage, SEC chairman Chris Cox.

Bargaining. His response mocked as incoherent at best, McCain then proceeded to the third textbook phase of grief over the economy: bargaining. As the Kubler-Ross model describes the bargaining stage, "Now the grieving person may make bargains with God, asking, 'If I do this, will you take away the loss?'"

So fast and furious, McCain started to bargain. Acknowledging that as President he couldn't fire the SEC's Cox, McCain instead called for his resignation. (This morning, McCain cynically offered up New York Democrat Andrew Cuomo as a replacement.) Within 24 hours, he changed his tune on AIG, now supporting the bail-out package he opposed just the day before:

"The government was forced to commit $85 billion...The focus of any such action should be to protect the millions of Americans who hold insurance policies, retirement plans and other accounts with AIG."

And to be sure, McCain bargained economic surrogate and serial embarrassment Carly Fiorina right out of his campaign. When the details of her massive $42 million severance package from HP became public, the woman who deemed McCain incapable of running a company found herself on the sidelines.

Depression. By last Thursday, a pall of gloom hung over McCain as he entered the fourth stage of grieving, depression. In a move that could only draw attention to his own checkered past in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980's, McCain meekly proposed the creation of a Mortgage and Financial Institutions (MFI) trust to help the failing firms of Wall Street fend off insolvency. Ironically, McCain had repeatedly opposed the Resolution Trust Corporation in the past, an institution that ultimately poured $400 billion into bailing out the S&L's, including the $3 billion lost by McCain sugar daddy Charles Keating's Lincoln Financial.

That same day, McCain tried to fight back, but his heart wasn't in it. In a foreboding ad fraught with racial overtones, McCain tried to link Obama with former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin Raines. While the Washington Post quickly debunked the spot by noting that Raines is not an adviser to the Obama campaign, Time suggested McCain was playing the race card.

Acceptance. By today, it was clear that John McCain had reached the fifth and final stage of grieving over the economic issue. Just one week after proclaiming the "fundamentals of our economy are strong," McCain said on the Today Show this morning:

"We are in the most serious crisis since World War II."

That clarity is letting McCain do what McCain does best - attack. In a cynical attempt at misdirection the Politico's Jonathan Martin deemed "tossing more chum overboard," the McCain campaign aired a new ad once again trying to connect Barack Obama to Chicago dealmaker Tony Rezko. And on Sunday, McCain ignored his own week of dizzying incoherence on the economy and thundered at Obama:

"At a time of crisis, when leadership is needed, Senator Obama has simply not provided it."

Apparently, John McCain's new-found acceptance of the dismal state of the economy lets him rage against the Obama machine without embarrassment. After all, McCain's transition manager William Timmons was a lobbyist for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This morning, the New York Times revealed that McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis pocketed $2 million in lobbying fees from the failed home mortgage giants. And on Sunday, McCain refused to rule out that his adviser and UBS vice chairman Phil Gramm, of "nation of whiners" fame and himself a possible bailout recipient, as Treasury Secretary in a McCain-Palin administration.

To be sure, watching John McCain wrestle with his demons - and ignorance - over the troubled economy has been painful to watch. As crypto-conservative columnist George Will put it:

"John McCain showed his personality this week and made some of us fearful."

But with his 11 houses and 13 cars, John McCain can afford to work through his cognitive breakdown over the state of the broken economy. Unfortunately, the rest of us can't. While Americans are mourning the loss of their homes and savings, John McCain is apparently grieving over his potential loss of the White House.

The implosion of Wall Street this week comes as a triple-dose of bad news for John McCain. No doubt, his daily-changing response to the crisis confirmed McCain's self-proclaimed ignorance of economics. Perhaps even more damaging, America's financial nightmare conjured images of the savings and loan scandal 20 years ago, one in which McCain's close ties to political sugar daddy Charles Keating almost ended his career. And to be sure, flashing back to McCain's 1989 temper tantrum in response to his Keating Five charges can only remind American voters that John McCain is dangerously unfit for the nation's highest office.

As I detailed previously, McCain's proposal on Thursday to essentially resurrect the Resolution Trust Corporation harkens back to S&L disaster in which he was a central figure. The RTC was an entity signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, which in the 1980's and 1990's ultimately poured $400 billion into hundreds of faltering savings and loan institutions. About $3 billion of that came from the collapse of Charles Keating's Lincoln Financial, the man for whom McCain interceded with federal thrift regulators.

While McCain was ultimately admonished by a Senate ethics panel only for "poor judgment," his behavior in response to the white hot press spotlight raises troubling questions about his fitness to lead. As the Arizona Republic recalled in March 2007:

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.

McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.

When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself.

"You're a liar," McCain said when a Republic reporter asked him about the business relationship between his wife and Keating.

"That's the spouse's involvement, you idiot," McCain said later in the same conversation. "You do understand English, don't you?"

He also belittled reporters when they asked about his wife's ties to Keating.

"It's up to you to find that out, kids."

Ultimately, the paper ran the story. After it broke, McCain held a news conference with his rage in check and calmly answered questions for 90 minutes. (In a preview of the 2008 campaign, McCain's defense was that his wife's finances - and extreme wealth - were separate from his own.)

But McCain's response also revealed another disturbing pattern that continues to this day. After launching a furious tirade against the media, McCain sought to forgiveness after the fact. As the Boston Globe described the episode:

When reporters questioned the investment, John McCain wrote in his autobiography, he "shouted at them, cursed them, and eventually slammed the phone down on them. It was ridiculously immature behavior."

In that same 2002 book, McCain pondered, "I don't know how (The Republic journalists) would have reported the story had I been more civil and understanding or just more of a professional during the interview."

Two weeks ago, Joe Klein of Time summed up McCain then and now with his indictment of the Republican nominee's "sleazy ads," predicting:

"I just can't wait for the moment when John McCain--contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat--talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig."

This week's financial meltdown should serve to focus Americans' minds on John McCain's dark role in precipitating the last one 20 years ago. And his hysterical reaction to the charges he faced then should give voters of all stripes pause. For his corruption and out-of-control temper, John McCain can't simply kiss and make up with the American press - or people.

As Joe Klein put it, "apology not accepted."

After his proposal Tuesday to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the meltdown on Wall Street was greeted with a mixture of yawns and giggles, McCain on Thursday essentially proposed the resurrection of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the entity signed into law by President George H.W. Bush that in the 1980's and 1990's ultimately poured $400 billion into hundreds of faltering savings and loan institutions:

First, to deal with the immediate crisis, I will lead in the creation of the Mortgage and Financial Institutions trust -- the MFI. The underlying principle of the MFI or any approach considered by Congress should be to keep people in their homes and safe guard the life savings of all Americans by protecting our financial system and capital markets. This trust will work with the private sector and regulators to identify institutions that are weak and fix them before they become insolvent.

Sadly, John McCain has a 20 year record of opposing the very kind of entity he now proposes to create. On March 25 of this year, his chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin (the same man who credited McCain with the invention of the Blackberry device) proclaimed McCain's opposition to a new Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) to address the home mortgage crisis:

"The senator is not in favor of an RTC-like vehicle that would wholesale purchase loans."

And as the Guardian noted yesterday, at the height of the savings and loan scandal two decades ago, John McCain tried to halt action by the creation of the RTC:

McCain joined Phil Gramm and other Republican senators in rebelling against the 1989 bill that created the RTC. Today he praised the very idea he voted to slow down, saying the RTC was "designed to clean up the system and worked."

Of course, McCain's free market orthodoxy wasn't the only factor at work in opposing the original RTC. Back then, John McCain's political benefactor was Charles Keating. And McCain's role in assisting Keating's Lincoln Financial, whose ultimate collapse cost American taxpayers $3 billion, nearly ended his political career.

Earlier this year, the Boston Globe summarized McCain's close relationship with Keating and his decision to intervene with federal regulators on his behalf:

McCain met Keating in 1982, during McCain's successful run for Congress, and soon began accepting offers from Keating to fly McCain's family on a corporate plane to Keating's house in the Bahamas. McCain did not pay for most of the trips until years later, when the matter became public.

Keating, meanwhile, complained regularly to McCain that a proposed regulation would hurt his business. Known as the "direct investment" rule, it limited the amount that savings-and-loan institutions could invest from their assets. In 1985, after having "heard frequently from Charlie on the matter," McCain decided that Keating's complaints "were sound enough to warrant our assistance." He cosponsored a resolution sought by Keating, but it failed to postpone the regulation, McCain wrote in his autobiography.

By then, Keating was one of McCain's most important benefactors; McCain received $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln associates, mostly between 1982 and 1986.

It was in April 1987 that McCain fatefully joined four other senators in meeting with Edwin Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Washington. After that meeting, Gray told his associate William K. Black that he was "very upset" that the senators were trying to pressure him.

Ultimately, a Senate ethics panel agreed with that assessment. California Democrat Alan Cranston was censured for "an impermissible pattern of conduct," while Senators DeConcini (D-AZ) and Riegle (D-MI) were criticized for actions which "gave the appearance of being improper." As for McCain, he and John Glenn (D-OH) were admonished for exercising "poor judgment."

McCain, who had told the Ethics Committee that his role in support of Keating was "to help constituents in a proper fashion," reacted to the panel's findings in 1991, "I am, of course, relieved that I have been exonerated."

And so it was that John McCain survived the Keating Five and S&L scandals with his career, if not his reputation, intact. As the New York Times recounted this past February:

When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 - one of the biggest collapses of the savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion - the Keating Five became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the careers of three senators, who were rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for intervening. Mr. McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the others, was reprimanded only for "poor judgment" and was re-elected the next year.

Some people involved think Mr. McCain got off too lightly. William Black, one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs. McCain's investment with Mr. Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her husband. (Mr. McCain had said a prenuptial agreement divided the couple's assets.) He should not be able to "put this behind him," Mr. Black said. "It sullied his integrity."

For his part, John McCain has acknowledged the blight on his record, if not his sense of his own honor. As Senator McCain put it in December 1999, the taint of his Keating Five role is permanent:

"The fact is, it was the wrong thing to do, and it will be on my tombstone and deservedly so."

But that hasn't prevented presidential candidate McCain from pretending this week that his part in the S&L tragedy never happened. That's quite a farce indeed. But Karl Marx notwithstanding, the election of John McCain to the White House in the face of this second, trillion-dollar American financial crisis would be no joke, but an epic tragedy.

In one of the more bizarre developments of campaign 2008, John McCain's campaign has announced that he won't be rolling out the White House welcome mat for Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, prime minister of America's NATO ally Spain. But if McCain's posture seems like an adolescent temper tantrum aimed at a critical member of Washington's Atlantic alliance, it's hardly an isolated episode. With his vitriolic Paris and Berlin-bashing in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003, John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with the France-hating purveyors of "freedom fries" and "old Europe."

McCain's Spanish Inquisition started yesterday, when the would-be Republican president seemed to suggest to an interviewer he would not commit to meeting with the Socialist Zapatero at the White House. But after speculation ran amok that John McCain simply didn't know who Zapatero was or confused him with Latin American leftists Castro, Chavez and Morales (about whom he had been asked to comment), McCain's foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann insisted there was no confusion:

"The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain's willingness to meet Zapatero (and ID'd him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview."

While there is uncertainty as to whether McCain really meant to slight Spain's Zapatero, leader of a member of the coalition of the no-longer willing in Iraq, there is no ambiguity about John McCain's past taunts and insults directed at France and Germany.

As President Bush prepared to pull the trigger on the Iraq war in February 2003, John McCain was at the forefront of those browbeating the Chirac government for France's refusal to back the U.S. at the United Nations. On February 10, 2003, McCain declared on MSNBC's Hardball:

"Look, I don't mean to try to be snide, but the Lord said the poor will always be with us. The French will always be with us, too."

The next day on February 11, 2003, McCain co-sponsored a Senate resolution praising 18 European nations backing U.S. enforcement of UN demands for Saddam's disarmament. In his press release, McCain echoed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in thundering at the France and Germany of "old Europe:"

"The majority of Europe's democracies have spoken, and their message could not be clearer: France and Germany do not speak for Europe...most European governments behave like allies that are willing to meet their responsibilities to uphold international peace and security in defense of our common values. We thank this European majority for standing with us."

McCain's venom towards the French was on full display two days later during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. On February 13, 2003, McCain warned of "new threats to civilization [which] again defy our imagination in scale and potency" portrayed Iraq as "threat of the first order." He proclaimed that "the United States does not have reliable allies to implement a policy to contain Iraq" and pointed the finger squarely at France:

"Compare our great power allies in the Cold War with those with whom we act today in dealing with Iraq.

France has unashamedly pursued a concerted policy to dismantle the UN sanctions regime, placing its commercial interests above international law, world peace and the political ideals of Western civilization. Remember them? Liberte, egalite, fraternite...

...Gerhard Schroeder's Germany looks little like the ally that anchored our presence in Europe throughout the Cold War. A German Rip Van Winkle from the 1960s would not understand the lack of political courage and cooperation with its allies on the question of Iraq exhibited in Berlin today."

Just days later on February 18, 2003, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline program showed a furious McCain foaming at the mouth over France:

Here's how influential Senator John McCain sees the French.

JOHN MCCAIN, REPUBLICAN SENATOR: They remind me of an aging movie actress in the 1940s who is still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it.

NORMAN HERMANT: Many in Washington are now saying relations with France have been a problem going all the way back to the end of World War II.

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Perhaps Churchill and Roosevelt made a very serious mistake when they decided to give France a veto in the Security Council when the United Nations was organized.

McCain's feud with the French continued even after the start of hostilities and President Bush's May 1 declaration of "mission accomplished" in Iraq. But in a cynical July 2003 keynote address to the Atlantic Partnership (which promotes "the benefits of a strong and stable Atlantic community of nations"), Senator McCain acted as if he had never uttered his seething words of condemnation. Even in papering over the schism he helped foster, McCain couldn't resist taking a potshot at France:

"France and Germany shared the goals of our campaign to disarm Saddam Hussein's regime. We obviously disagreed over the means. Now that we have achieved our common objective of ending the threat posed by Saddam's Iraq, it's time to stop quarreling over the way we did so and move on. European nations that opposed the war must resist the tendency to say "I told you so," sit on the sidelines as the United States and our partners attempt to transform Iraq, and hope we find ourselves in a sandy quagmire that, in the eyes of some war opponents, would give us our just due...

...The United States must resist the tendency to punish our friends who did not support how we went to war, because things could have turned out differently. By the admission of Germany's leading opposition figures, who lost a close election to the current chancellor's coalition, a government in Berlin led by them would have stood with the United States in the diplomatic campaign preceding the war. France would have been isolated in its opposition, unable to claim to speak for Europe."

For his part, President Bush despite the clashes over Iraq still welcomed Chirac, Schroeder and Zapatero's conservative predecessor Aznar to the White House. As for McCain, he seemed to suggest during his visit to Paris in March that relations with the United States would improve solely due to the deference to the U.S. properly restored by right-wing President Sarkozy:

"I think relations with France will continue to improve no matter who is president of the United States because this president is committed to greater cooperation and values our friendship."

But when it comes to Spain's Zapatero, according to Randy Scheunemann, not so much. Apparently, conservatives only need apply for admission to the McCain White House.

But even more insulting, of course, is that John McCain knows all too well that "economic fundamentals" means something else. It's not just that McCain has used the expression at least 18 times over the course of the campaign. Back in April, he told us how he defined the term, and to be sure, the American worker was no part of it.

On April 17th, Senator McCain was interviewed on Bloomberg TV by Peter Cook. Cook posed Ronald Reagan's Carter-killing question to McCain. John McCain proudly declared not only "that there's been great progress economically" during the Bush presidency, but that "the fundamentals of America's economy are strong":

MR. COOK: I'm going to ask you a version of the Ronald Reagan question. You think if Americans were asked, are you better off today than you were before George Bush took office more than seven years ago, what answer would they give?

SEN. MCCAIN: [...] I think if you look at the overall record and millions of jobs have been created, et cetera, et cetera, you could make an argument that there's been great progress economically over that period of time. But that's no comfort. That's no comfort to families now that are facing these tremendous economic challenges.

But let me just add, Peter, the fundamentals of America's economy are strong. We're the greatest exporter, the greatest importer, the greatest innovator, the greatest producer, still the greatest economic engine in the world. And, by the way, exports and free trade are a key element in economic recovery.

As with his feeble attempt Monday to disown his Hoover-era rhetoric, McCain literally the next day on April 18th flip-flopped on the Bush economy. Again appearing on Bloomberg TV, this time with host Al Hunt, McCain backtracked and acknowledged, "Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago."

Fast forward to this week's Wall Street meltdown and John McCain is in full retreat from his "fundamentals are strong" comment. His semantic scheme isn't merely to question what the meaning of "is" is. This time, he's using American workers as a human shield:

"My opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals of America are strong...Our workers have always been the strength of our economy, and they remain the strength of our economy today."

Sadly, the saga over "fundamentals" is just the latest installment of John McCain's long-running tale of duplicity when it comes to the economy. Back in June, McCain ridiculed economists for their overwhelming dismissal of his proposed gas-tax holiday scheme:

"You know the economists?'' McCain said June 12 at Federal Hall, near the New York Stock Exchange. "They're the same ones that didn't predict this housing crisis we're in. They're the same ones that didn't predict the dot-com meltdown. They're the same ones that didn't predict the inflation that's staring us in the face today."

Three weeks later, McCain had a change of heart towards their profession, announcing that 300 economists had "enthusiastically endorsed" his so-called "Jobs for America" plan. But as the Politico noted at the time, that too was a fraud:

There's just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don't actually support the whole of McCain's economic agenda. And at least one doesn't even support McCain for president.

This morning, the New York Times rightly concluded of McCain's rapid redefinition of economic fundamentals, "The clarification was far more worrisome than his initial comments." After all, this pathetic chapter is just the latest confirmation that John McCain's understanding of the fundamentals of the American economy is weak.

As the meltdown on Wall Street continues, American voters would do well to regard John McCain and his Republican Party with suspicion when it comes to the resuscitating the economy. But McCain's acknowledged ignorance on economic issues, happy talk about strong "fundamentals," ties to lobbyists and disturbing involvement in the 1980's savings and loan disaster aren't the only reasons voters should flock to Barack Obama for solutions to the mushrooming financial crisis. As history has proven time and again, Wall Street and the economy overall simply do better under Democratic presidents.

To be sure, the prospect of John McCain at the helm of the American economy is a frightening one. On multiple occasions, McCain deemed the downturn "psychological," while proclaiming as recently as Monday's 500 point drop in the Dow that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." Even Alan Greenspan, whose book McCain claimed in December 2007 offset that fact that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," blasted McCain's $3.3 trillion budget-busting tax plan, "I'm not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money."

Then there is the question, in the words of the New York Life ad, of "the company you keep." From campaign chairman Rick Davis and transition chief William Timmons on down, the McCain campaign is dominated by Wall Street lobbyists. John McCain's economic adviser and UBS vice-chairman Phil Gramm (the same Phil Gramm who mocked Americans as a "nation of whiners") this week saw his firm face another $5 billion in write-downs. And by regurgitating virtually the same policy prescriptions as George W. Bush on tax cuts, health care, Social Security privatization, John McCain is offering Americans more of the same snake oil that produced the current economic calamity.

Then there are the eerie parallels between today's market meltdown and the savings and loan implosion of the late 1980's and 1990's. That fiasco of deregulation ultimately cost American taxpayers as much as $300 billion. Some $2.6 billion of that was attributed to the collapse of Lincoln Financial, run by McCain sugar daddy Charles Keating. While John McCain survived the Keating Five scandal (barely), Washington's multi-billion bailouts and cash infusions this week are grim reminders of why McCain can't be trusted to regulate his friends or run the economy.

But there is a much more basic reason to keep John McCain and the Republicans out of the White House. As the record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of UCLA study in 2003:

"It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats...

...Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.

Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference."

In 2002, Slate similarly concluded that "Democrats, it turns out, are much better for the stock market than Republicans":

Slate ran the numbers and found that since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return. In 2000, the Stock Trader's Almanac, which slices and dices Wall Street performance figures like baseball stats, came up with nearly the same numbers (13.4 percent versus 8.1 percent) by measuring Dow price appreciation. (Most of the 20th century's bear markets, incidentally, have been Republican bear markets: the Crash of '29, the early '70s oil shock, the '87 correction, and the current stall occurred under GOP presidents.)

According to almanac editor Jeffrey Hirsch, the presidential party figures are among the most significant he's found. If the stock market were random, we'd expect such a result only one-quarter of the time. "I don't know why people are convinced Republicans are good for the stock market," Hirsch says.

Why? Because Republican water carriers like Larry Kudlow and Donald Luskin continue - with great success - to perpetuate the myth that the regulation-free policies of the GOP that so benefit them personally somehow help the American people overall. (In an example of legendarily bad timing, right-wing water carrier and McCain adviser Luskin took to the pages of the Washington Post Sunday to defend Phil Gramm's assessment of the economy, calling America "a nation of exaggerators.")

So, when John McCain calls for a commission to look into the crisis on Wall Street and decries, "a casino on Wall Street of greedy, corrupt excess," remember that he's describing his friends and political allies. And as the history shows, it's not just John McCain's record on the economy which is pathetic. He has that in common with his Republican predecessors.

As Harry Truman famously said, "if you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

During the Republican convention in St. Paul, Fred Thompson offered a folksy if bizarre recounting of John McCain's rebellious days at the United States Naval Academy. But while McCain's bottom-of-his-class record there was "loaded with demerits," Thompson assured Americans, "he never violated the honor code." That may or may not have been true about John McCain's days at Annapolis. But there can be no doubt that with his avalanche of lies, distortions and smears, candidate John McCain is violating that code today.

In 1953, midshipman H. Ross Perot (you can't make this stuff up) drafted an honor system for officers of the Naval Service. He wrote:

Honor, personal integrity, and loyalty to the service, its customs and its traditions, are fundamental characteristics essential to a successful Naval Officer. Any midshipman unable to conduct himself at all times in a manner indicating the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and manliness, is unfit to hold a commission in the Navy or to enjoy the privilege of being a member of the Brigade. Therefore, any midshipman guilty of offenses of a dishonest nature, such as Falsehood (including any form of deception or attempt to deceive) or Fraud (including false muster- answering for another at muster, or any form of cheating) or of offenses indicating Moral Turpitude, is an individual intolerable to the Brigade, and becomes immediately subject to a recommendation for dismissal from the Naval Service.

Today, the web site of the United States Naval Academy offers a simpler, more streamlined version of its "Honor Concept:"

"Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right.

They tell the truth and ensure that the full truth is known. They do not lie.

They embrace fairness in all actions. They ensure that work submitted as their own is their own, and that assistance received from any source is authorized and properly documented. They do not cheat.

They respect the property of others and ensure that others are able to benefit from the use of their own property. They do not steal."

By either reading, presidential candidate John McCain has established himself as anything but a "person of integrity." With his endless falsehoods and frauds when it comes to savaging Barack Obama or rewriting the record of his running mate Sarah Palin, John McCain hasn't put either the truth or his country first.

As I noted earlier today, Team McCain's mountain of falsehoods about Sarah Palin's history on earmarks, travel to Iraq, national security and energy expertise and the Bridge to Nowhere have grown to almost comic proportions. (On the earmark issue. even the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal weighed in on the reality of Palin's pork-barrel pursuit.) Editorial boards across the nation branded McCain's ads and statements "intellectually dishonest", "deceptive", "double-speak", "a fictional narrative" and a "campaign of lies." On Saturday, NBC's Mark Murray in a piece simply titled, "Wheels Come off Straight Talk Express?" documented "a brutal day for John McCain and his campaign" as the chorus of press criticism reached a crescendo.

On Sunday, even the excreable Karl Rove acknowledged John McCain had "gone, in some of his ads...one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100 percent truth test."

During his St. Paul speech, Fred Thompson offered a moving account of John McCain's Vietnam service to America. He also made a point of emphasizing that "being a POW certainly doesn't qualify anyone to be president. But it does reveal character." And no doubt, so does McCain's behavior since.

Sadly, airman McCain's legend as a naval pilot is now a distant memory, his reputation shredded and tarnished at the hands of Senator McCain.