I would like to think that I could uncover some brilliant piece of information about John McCain by myself, but even if I did, I would have only one small set of information.
What I thought about doing here was making a call for good, solid information about what John McCain actually has done in office. He sets himself as a paragon of political virtue, but if you look deeper, the illusion frays. However, he has engineered, through a generation's worth of news coverage, a more admirable image than he deserves.
McCain's best friend right now is the media memory hole. The popular ignorance of his actions is what keeps his image nice and sparkly. Part of what keeps us ignorant is that we don't see the big picture. We get bits and pieces. We need more, and more together.
Standards are important. We don't want thin stuff that gets easily blown through with a factcheck. We need good stuff. I really don't care whether he's got the Swedish Bikini Team stashed in his Senate office.
Links to stories about the Keating Five are welcome. McCain might like to think the story is behind him, but what exactly does he think is behind him? Let me tell you, this author is 28 currently, so my memories of this scandal are childhood memories. It would be nice for those of us who were, in some cases, negatively aged when the scandal broke to be apprised of the information, and all in one place.
Like it's been said before, though, experience is only good to the extent its learned from. What has McCain learned? To redeem his wrongdoing, or to camouflage it better? We need the evidence and the news stories to tell us where McCain has gone since then.
Now what might really be nice is personal recollection of events and actions concerning McCain. It will be good to get corroborating accounts and facts to put together here, though, and we should label this stuff as such.
I don't know what kind of response I will get here. I hope people are interested. If you know of something that hasn't lately been in the news, please contribute, and if you don't distribute it here, put out your own diary. I know we've been a little distracted with internal matters here, but I think everybody can agree that our number one priority in the long term is making sure that there's no third Bush term. Or first McCain one.