Money Business

"Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored."

-- Gary Hart, May 3, 1987

Then guess what happened?!?

“On May 5, the Herald received a further tip that Hart had spent a night in Bimini on a yacht called the Monkey Business with a woman who was not his wife. The Herald obtained photographs of Hart aboard the Monkey Business with then-29-year-old model Donna Rice, sitting on Hart's lap. The photographs were subsequently published in the National Enquirer[11]. On May 8, 1987, a week after the story broke, Hart dropped out of the race.”

21 years later...

Responding to questions about his campaign manager’s role in a lobbying firm that had Freddie Mac as a client through 2005: “[Rick Davis] 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."

-- John Seymore McCain, September 21, 2008

Then guess what happened?!?

“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...”

21 years ago, after one of the leading contenders for the presidency got busted doing something he shouldna oughtna (bad) and lying about it (much worse), his candidacy crashed and burned, and his public career went into the political ICU never to return.

21 years later, after weeks of wild, reckless decisions, temper tantrums, flip-flops and ridiculous, flagrant lies from the McCain campaign, we are left with an open and deeply troubling question: Will it matter?

Although there are some hopeful signs of a fundamental realignment this year, Presidential politics since Nixon has more and more come to reassemble trench warfare over a few yards of No Man’s Land. So half the country is permanently ensorcelled by “America’s Top Model” and considers any mention of politics a rude intrusion into their NCIS SVU CICS TMS CSI ETA WTF 90210 time, and 45% of the rest would not vote for the Risen Christ if he had a (D) after his name.

And in that static, blasted electoral landscape the Rove/McSame campaign is calculating that even the once-upon-a-time Doomsday Weapon of being caught on tape just flat-out lying – repeatedly – will end up doing little more than bouncing the rubble around.