If the Senator formerly known as a straight talker and his ‘aw shucks’ sidekick are going to focus on half-baked, barely credible “links” to bad characters and play six-degrees-of-baloney, Camp Obama is going to beat back those low blows with a few right and left hooks by discussing McCain’s actual, long-term, and close relationships to nefarious ne’er-do-wells and demonstrate how those unethical friendships harm our nation with the bright light of truth and honesty such as that in the recently launched KeatingEconomics.com.

My fellow Americans, as this documentary at KeatingEconomics.com shows we have been through a banking crisis in this country before, all too recently. And it was Sen. McCain’s zeal for deregulation and “poor judgment” when it came to his good pal Charles Keating that was at the heart of that $2.6 Billion+ “mistake”.

McCain was not just One of the Keating Five. He was a vacation buddy, a Senate “in”, and a defensive attack dog when it came to his “good friend” Mr. Keating.

Strangely, in today’s easily debunked lies trying to toss that good McCain-Keating friendship under the Not-So-Straight Talk bus, McCain has been laughably claiming that he was open about it at the time [link] and that the investigation itself was some sort of smear job…

John Aravosis did a little digging over the weekend to learn the truth about McCain’s reaction to the then-brand new Keating 5 Scandal:

When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself. “You’re a liar,” McCain said when a[n Arizona] Republic reporter asked him about the business relationship between his wife and Keating. “That’s the spouse’s involvement, you idiot,” McCain said later in the same conversation. “You do understand English, don’t you?” He also belittled reporters when they asked about his wife’s ties to Keating. “It’s up to you to find that out, kids.” The paper ran the story.

Aravosis also points out that McCain was committing his self-admitted “poor judgment” over his good friend’s bamboozlement costing billions while in his 50s, not 8 years old like Obama was when current conservative strawman Bill Ayers was committing his despicable crimes. That, and McCain used to actually admit to his mistakes and “poor judgment”, saying in his own book (Worth Fighting For):

I made the worst mistake of my life by attending two meetings, the first with the chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the government agency charged with regulating the practices of the nation’s savings and loans, and a week later with four bank examiners based in San Francisco who were at that time investigating the investment and lending practices of Lincoln Savings and Loan of Irvine, California, owned by my good friend and generous supporter Charles Keating.

Clearly, now that they’ve backed themselves into a corner by smearing the room with their own fetid bunk and have nowhere to go but even further down, the frenetic McCain campaign’s dragon-breath all-attacks, all-the-time strategy is forcing the calm, cool and collected (and steel-spined) Obama camp to fight fire with fire. Politico concludes:

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”

That’s not a difficult argument to make, seeing as how McCain’s most (in)visible economic advisor is former Sen. Phil Gramm. While he’s most famous for recently hypocritically crying that America is a “nation of whiners,” Mr. Gramm co-authored the very legislation which led to the mortgage and banking deregulation and line-blurring that precipitated our current mess.