False Advertising.

From HuffPo:

         Two reports tonight, one from the New York Times, and the other from Newsweek, contradict John McCain's earlier statement that his campaign manager Rick Davis had no involvement with mortgage giant Freddie Mac, one of the companies at the heart of the current financial crisis, for the last several years. TheTimes reports:

     One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain's campaign manager from the end of 2005 through last month, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement. The disclosure contradicts a statement Sunday night by Mr. McCain that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had no involvement with the company for the last several years. Mr. Davis's firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the people said...

     ...On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about Mr. Davis's role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager "has had nothing to do with it since, and I'll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it."

     Both articles note that McCain has been attacking Obama over his own ties to the two former lending giants. The McCain campaign has argued that despite whatever connections Davis or other McCain campaign officials had to the mortgage giants, McCain was a leading advocate for reforming them. However, the Times' reporting punches some holes in McCain's claim:

     In an interview Tuesday with conservative talk-radio host Neal Boortz, Mr. McCain said, "I remember warning at that time that Fannie and Freddie were out of control and that they needed to be reined in. And, frankly, I warned that this kind of thing could lead to serious problems. Now, in full disclosure, I didn't foresee something this huge, but certainly I saw the fundamentals there for serious problems when you have a quasi government agency acting the way they did."

     But a Freddie Mac official said Mr. McCain "never took on the role that some other Republicans did" to try to limit the companies. He named instead Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, all of whom were on the banking committee during recent years. "I remember working against a number of amendments and they were always introduced by Hagel and Sununu. John McCain was never anywhere to be found."

John McCain's bus drove straight into the ditch a long time ago, and his brand is dead.

"Straight Talk" was always bullshit, anyway; he used that tagline as a business card to hand to a rapt press pool who hung on his back-of-the-bus, faux-Everyman words.

If he was ever viewed as a "maverick" by casual voters--I've never seen him as one--that description has surely vanished now, as he has backtracked on virtually all of his old positions. 

That just brings him back to more of the same.

To top it off, his judgement leads him to a woman who can't even be trusted to speak--unscripted--to the free press for which we must assume McCain also fought.

He fought for something; he reminds us of that several times a day. 

None of his schtick is "maverick".    

It's just Straight Bullshit.