1115.org

This is John McCain, back in November 2007, when he still believed his own hype, frankly admitting that the mortgage crisis took him by surprise:

Q: Well the dimension of this problem may be surprising to a lot of people, but to many people, to many others there were feelings that there was something amiss, something was going too fast, something was a little too hot. Going back several years. Were you one of them? Or, I mean you’re a busy guy, you’re looking at a lot of things, maybe subprime mortgages wasn’t something you focused on every day. Were you surprised?

McCAIN: Yeah. And I was surprised at the dot-com collapse and I was surprised at other times in our history. …
[…]
I don’t know the dimensions of this. It’s hard to know what the dimensions are. …

… [I]n this whole new derivative stuff, and SIBs and all of this kind of new ways of packaging mortgages together and all that is something that frankly I don’t know a lot about.

But I do rely on a lot of smart people that I have that are both in my employ and acquaintances of mine. And most of them did not anticipate this. Most of them, I mean I can find some that did. But, a guy that’s on my staff named Doug Holtz-Eakin, who was once the head of the Office of Management and Budget, said that there was nervousness out there. There’s nervousness. There was nervousness that we had such a long period of prosperity without a downturn because of the history of our economy. But I don’t know of hardly anybody, with the exception of a handful, that said ‘wait a minute, this thing is getting completely out of hand and is overheating.’

So, I’d like to tell you that I did anticipate it, but I have to give you straight talk, I did not.

Now, of course, naked power-lust has set him free, my friends. He doesn’t have to give us straight talk any more. That’s why he went on all the networks on Tuesday and told us he saw the whole mortgage crisis coming a long way off, right down to The Travails of Fannie and Freddie. Here’s the CBS version of McCain’s crooked talk:

On CBS’s “The Early Show” yesterday, McCain said, “[T]wo years ago I warned that the oversight of Fannie and Freddie was terrible, that we were facing a crisis because of it, or certainly serious problems…. The influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside-the-beltway, old-boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable, and I warned about it a couple of years ago.”

(It might also be helpful to McCain’s credibility if he could remember the background of the guy who is one of his closest advisers. Holtz-Eakin was the head of the Congressional Budget Office, not the Office of Management and Budget. Tell me again that this guy hasn’t completely lost his grip on facts of all kinds.)

*** Update, 7:35 am ***

Another nail in the “lost his grip” coffin:

According to Spain’s El Pais, John McCain would not answer this week whether he would be willing to meet with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. “Would you be willing to meet with the head of our government, Mr. Zapatero?” the questioner asked multiple times. Five months ago, McCain said he would be willing. But in the interview earlier this week, McCain could not offer a coherent and logical response:
McCain proceeded to launch into what appeared to be a boilerplate declaration about Mexico and Latin America — but not Spain — pressing the need to stand up to world leaders who want to harm America. “I will meet with those leaders who are our friends and who want to work with us cooperatively,” according to one translation. The reporter repeated the question two more times, apparently trying to clarify, but McCain referred again to Latin America.

Finally, the questioner said, “Okay, but I’m talking about Europe – the president of Spain, would you meet with him?” The Senator offered only a slight variance to his initial comment. “I will reunite with any leader that has the same principles and philosophy that we do: human rights, democracy, and liberty. And I will confront those that don’t [have them].”

Josh Marshall observed that one possibility is that, since the questioner “asked about Castro and Chavez,” McCain didn’t know who Zapatero was and assumed he “must be some other Latin American bad guy.”

Incidentally, Josh Marshall’s explanation that it was ignorance rather than soft-headedness doesn’t seem to fly, since the interviewer had asked: “Would you be willing to meet with the head of our government, Mr. Zapatero?”