Sellout McCain

The WaPo has an article on McCain fundraising for his presidential run.

Note: I supported McCain in 2000 when he was hatcheted in the South Carolina primary by Rove through a whisper campaign that he had an illegitimate black baby. Dan Balz doesn't go beyond a vague mention of that in this article. When McCain allowed the "swiftboating" of Kerry, a supposed McCain "friend," to go on unchallenged, (remember how all the press kept asking him to condemn it?) and even went to campaign with Bush at the height of the "controversy," I knew that I had been had in 2000. I knew that McCain was a sellout.

So, I don't find myself surprised that he is now going to the same people in South Carolina for money who tanked his 2000 run by the "illegitimate black baby" campaign.

I'll say it again, amoral sellout.

But one of his most important events was not on the public schedule -- a 5 p.m. meeting at a Spartanburg hotel with loyalists to President Bush.

A dozen or so people were in attendance. At least two were among Bush's major national fundraisers. Virtually all had been on Bush's side in the bitter 2000 South Carolina primary that badly damaged McCain's chances of winning the presidential nomination and scarred the relationship between the two men and their rival political camps. McCain was there to woo them......

With a 2008 campaign in the offing, McCain has begun an intensive courtship of Bush's financial and political networks. His recent travels included a December swing through the heart of Bush country in Texas that put him in front of many of the president's leading supporters there.

By the way, if you're looking for other dirt on McCain, remember that he only became a "reformist" after he got outed as a member of the "Keating Five," one of five Congressmen and Senators who accepted big money and big gifts from Lincoln Savings and Loan figure Charles Keating to influence a federal regulatory board overseeing Keating's S&L. McCain received $112,000, which was a ton of political money at the time, and nine trips on Keating's jet including the Bahamas. (Reason)

And, doing a little googling looking for the Keating link, I came across all sorts of other dirt. The remnants of previous anti-McCain campaigns by the right are all over the web. They're pretty ugly, but my point is that he's not the beloved figure presented on the Sunday morning shows and that his "independence" is a political play. And, now he's going after campaign funds from Bush supporters.

I admit that I was had in 2000. Now, I am a lover scorned. Amoral sellout.