McCain Can't Pretend To Care About the Economy

There was something comical and insane about Beer Heiress John McCain mumbling "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" as the Dow Jones index tumbled 500 points and the S&P 500 lost nearly 5% and once mighty Wall Street investment houses crumbled.

McCain was born into power and married (the second time) into money -- big money, with all the mansions and jets that come with a hundred million dollars. Has he ever even balanced a checkbook?

His only experience with governing the U.S. economy was greasing the wheels for his corrupt banker friends in Arizona to help start that last American financial collapse and taxpayer-funded bailout, the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s.

This is a guy who said, earlier this year, that if you wanted a president who could handle a real-estate catastrophe, go vote for somebody else.

"And if they choose to say, 'Look, I do not need this guy because he's not as good on home loan mortgages,' or whatever it is," McCain said in January, half a year into the credit crunch and a year deep in the housing collapse, "I understand that. I will accept that verdict. I am running because of the transcendent challenge of the twenty-first century, which is radical Islamic extremism, as you know."

Well, whatever. John McCain wants to celebrate 9/11 every day, forever, by bombing any country he can recognize on a map, and that's fine as long as it remains the harmless fantasy of a war-obsessed geezer kept far from the White House.

That he still has no idea America is crumbling -- its middle class, infrastructure, manufacturing base and banking system -- is almost funny.

Of course it's not too funny if you're one of the 605,000 people who lost a job this year, or one of the 2 million homeowners who lost their house to foreclosure in 2008, or somebody ready to retire on a 401k that lost 30% or 40% in value in the past year.

Ken Layne is the managing editor of Wonkette.