McCain the Maverick

I'm old enough to remember the savings and loan scandal as an adult. I'm jaded enough to be tired of this "McCain is a straight-talking maverick" hoodwink. Let's not forget he is from an "elite" family, and his questionably unethical interfering on behalf of rich beneficiaries goes back decades and involves activities that has cost us real money, and some worse. From the wikipedia article on the Keating Five, of which McCain is one...

"Gray testified that several U.S. senators had approached him and requested that he ease off on the Lincoln investigation. It came out that these senators had been beneficiaries of $300,000 (collective total) in campaign contributions from Keating. McCain received $112,000 by 1987 from Keating and Keating's relatives and employees to McCain's Senate campaign, more than any of the other Senators. In September 1987 National Thrift News was the first media outlet to break the story. In October 1989 The Arizona Republic reported that in addition to campaign contributions, 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 Corporation (parent of Lincoln) 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. Lincoln Savings and Loan's collapse is said to have cost taxpayers $3.4 billion."