I can't wait to get to Washington to clean up the corrupt old crowd, and I'll start quick, since I'm already there.

At times I wonder if McCain really believes that after 26 years in Washington, D.C., he's really an outsider, or if he is so damn cynical that he thinks voters are stupid enough to fall for outsider rhetoric from a man who's lived there for more than a quarter of a century. Yet we have this idiotic piece of rhetoric dropping from his lips:

"Let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd," he said in his speech. "Change is coming."

Dude. You are obviously referring to yourself in the first sentence. The only change would be your location a little further down Pennsylvania Avenue, and that's not much of a change since you voted with the current occupant 95% of the time.

And is the crowd "big-spending" or are they "do-nothing"? And exactly who's on McCain's list of "me-first, country-second" officials? Is he talking about the BushCheney Regime, who decided to settle an old score against puppet-turned-petty-strongman Saddam Hussein on the country's dime? Maybe he's talking about the type of Senator who would use his influence to pressure federal regulators to ease up on their investigations of "friends." Oops. I guess that would include McCain himself, the last remaining active Senator among the Keating Five. The wikipedia article on the Keating Five goes out of its way to all but exonerate McCain, despite the fact that he and his family had substantial financial and personal interests in keeping Keating out of trouble.

In fact, the whole bunch of scumbags -- Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, Ben Riegle, and John McCain -- suffered almost nothing for their corruption. Cranston, ill at the time and not seeking re-election, was "severely reprimanded" by the Senate (as in, tsk tsk...), Riegle and DeConcini were told they had acted improperly, and Glenn and McCain were basically told they had "poor judgement" -- kind of like the kid who hangs out with the bad crowd but really has a heart of gold. Uh huh.

DeConcini was even rewarded for his improper interference with a Federal Home Loan Bank Board regulatory investigation by the Clinton Administration appointing him to -- get this -- the Board of Directors of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. Talk about putting a fox in charge of the henhouse.

But political corruption in the end fails to excite, unless of course it involves sex. You can steal billions of dollars from the public coffers, sell your vote to the highest bidder, but unless you get some sort of nookie, the American media and public don't have much of an attention span. Both Glenn and McCain were re-elected by the moron majority in their states, and the beat goes on.