John McCain hasn’t quite reached The Ultimate Flip-Flop yet, but he’s getting there rapidly. We may yet see it before the end of this campaign.

This guy has flip-flopped on every meaningful policy position he ever held, many of them more than once. At this point, there are many different Official McCain Flip-Flop lists, but I’m partial to Steve Benen‘s, which was the very first one, I believe. His count has McCain up to 76 official flip-flops. And that’s not yet updated for the outrageous flip-flop that McCain’s campaign uncorked yesterday.

Even though by now they may have managed to exhaust all the other flip-flop possibilities they could come up with, this latest flop-flop still boggles the mind. Because they are now reversing McCain’s long-held position on what, till yesterday, would have been universally regarded as the flip-flop-proof sacred cow.

For years, John McCain made elaborate displays of public contrition about his involvement in the Keating Five scandal, admitting that he made errors in judgment when he lobbied regulators on behalf of a corrupt banker who eventually went to prison. But now his campaign is suddenly saying that McCain did nothing wrong.

On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, held in response to the Obama campaign’s ramped-up attacks on McCain’s involvement in the scandal, the campaign brought out attorney John Dowd, who served as McCain’s counsel at the time. Dowd declared that he vehemently disagreed with the judgment of the Senate Ethics Committee that McCain had made some serious mistakes. “That’s not something that as his counsel I accepted,” Dowd said.

Dowd singled out the late Sen. Howell Heflin (D-AL), who vocally criticized McCain at the time, for particular scorn. “But you know, Sen. Mitchell was the majority leader, and Howell Heflin was his stooge,” said Dowd. “And he was doing what he was told because the rest were Democrats in the hearing. So it’s sort of a classic political smear-job on John.”

The odd thing is that McCain himself has written that the Keating Five period was a dark time in his life, and that he himself believed he’d made serious errors in judgment.

The facts of the case, in case anyone’s interested in judging whether McCain’s original contrition or his sudden renunciation thereof is more convincing:

Charles Keating, who ran the bank, had contributed a lot of money to McCain and the other four Senators; he had flown McCain and his family to vacations in the Bahamas, vacations McCain paid for only after they were made public; he had invested with Cindy McCain and her father as partners. Keating was later asked about these contributions:
“”One question, among many raised in recent weeks, had to do with whether my financial support in any way influenced several political figures to take up my cause,” he told reporters in April after Federal regulators had taken over Lincoln, with its $6 billion in insured deposits, almost $4 billion of which went to speculative investments in real estate and high-risk “junk bonds.”

“I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so.”"

In 1987, Lincoln was in trouble: “Gray’s regulators had found that, by the end of 1986, Lincoln Savings had exceeded the investment regulation by $600 million and had unreported losses of more than $130 million.” Keating was worried that his bank might be seized. So the five Senators, including McCain, met with regulators to urge them to back off. The regulators refused. Ultimately, the bank failed…
[...]
“I’ll tell you the biggest thing Sen. McCain — then Rep. McCain — tried to do,” Black (one of the regulators who was in one of the meetings with McCain back in 1987) said on NPR. “The administration attempted to give Charles Keating control over the federal agency regulating savings and loans. There were three presidential appointees and there were to be two members chosen by Charles Keating. Sen. McCain was not only aware of that effort but supportive of it. Had that occurred, the savings and loan crisis, instead of being $125 billion to $150 billion, would have been over a trillion dollars. It would have probably still been our worst political scandal in history.”

His culpability in the Keating Five scandal has always been the cornerstone of McCain’s political identity. To hear McCain himself tell it, it explains the entire trajectory of his political life. To atone for his admitted transgressions in the Keating Five scandal, to salvage the tarnished honor of the McCains, he became a maverick, a reformer, and he championed campaign finance reform (or, at least in another life he did). Take away McCain’s culpability in the Keating Five scandal , and his entire political career stops making sense. Which may be why McCain himself readily admitted that something was rotten:

The appearance of it was wrong. It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

And now they have cheerfully shredded the very foundation of McCain’s political identity. If that doesn’t qualify as McCain’s Ultimate Flip-Flop, what would?

Here’s what I predict we’ll see in roughly three weeks’ time:
— In The Ultimate Flip-Flop, John McCain will go under the knife and emerge as Jane McCain (in the hope of picking up the startled votes of all those pathologically disappointed Hillarymaniacs)
— If Sarah Palin is as loyal to her boss as she demands her subordinates must be to her — and that’s a big if — she’ll undergo a gender flip-flop too