Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt are retarded... they can't possibly come up with enough "questionable associations" to smear Obama with in response to the floodgate they just opened... Paul Begala was on Meet The Press yesterday and made it pretty clear... McCain has a torrid past with lots and lots of bad connections:
Mob Connections... notice this is a right wing site and the author is Jerome Corsi
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=57354
Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) indicted for extortion, wire fraud, money laundering and other charges related to a land deal in Arizona, according to the Associated Press. Renzi and two former business partners were accused of conspiring to promote the sale of land that buyers could swap for property owned by the federal government.” Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) was co-chair of McCain’s Arizona campaign (i.e., a member of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) “National Leadership Team” and a co-chair of his Arizona Leadership Team). Renzi has been in the past a "good friend" of John McCain and they were seen together often.
Charles Keating. Then there is the Keating 5 Scandal and Charles Keating’s notorious friendship and association with John McCain back in the 1980’s. During the Keating Five affair Keating had made contributions of about $1.3 million to various U.S. Senators involved, including John McCain, and Keating had called on those Senators to help him resist regulators in exchange for the money. McCain and the other Senators got the regulators to back off, to later trigger the Savings and Loan Scandal which cost the taxpayer BILLIONS. Cindy’s dad the Budweiser Brewery kingpin also has special dealings with Keating.
Donald R. Diamond: McCain has done political favors for real estate developer Donald R. Diamond. McCain stepped in to use his official clout to facilitate a sale of land that Diamond had wanted to obtain. Diamond got help through red tape in dealing with the Department of the Army because Mr. Diamond “had been very active with Senator McCain,” a partner said in a deposition. For McCain, who has staked two presidential campaigns on pledges to avoid even the appearance of corruption, this is another instance, like the Keating 5 Scandal in which McCain dispensed official favors for Mr. Diamond, a longtime political campaign donor of McCain’s and one of an elite group of donors called “Innovators,” because he raised more than $250,000 for McCain’s campaign. Mr. Diamond invites public officials aboard his flotilla of yachts and specializes in deals with the members of government in exchange for campaign donations.
Richard Quinn. In the 2000 presidential primary, all the time he was blasting George W. Bush for campaigning at Bob Jones University, McCain himself was paying $20,000 a month to South Carolina political consultant Richard Quinn, a neo-Confederate revanchist who was one of the leaders of the state's pro-flag faction. Quinn was editor in chief of Southern Partisan, a magazine that published apologias for slavery and sold paraphernalia celebrating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Quinn himself once advocated voting for David Duke.The day after the South Carolina 2000 primary, McCain didn't distance himself from Quinn. Instead, he professed ignorance about Quinn's writings, just as Bush did about Bob Jones' policies, and argued, as Bush also did about Bob Jones, that Ronald Reagan had done the same thing he was doing. But where Bush later criticized Bob Jones in stringent terms after the fact, McCain continued to describe Quinn as "a man of integrity" who wasn't responsible for what appeared in his own magazine. Though McCain's Richard Quinn connection was worse than Bush's Bob Jones faux pas, it never turned into a big deal for one simple reason: The press let McCain get away with it, even as it held Bush's feet to the fire about Bob Jones anti-Catholic stance..
Charles Black Jr.: Senior McCain campaign adviser Charlie Black has friends in low places. Black served as chair of BKSH & Associates, a lobbying firm associated with Burson-Marsteller. He had ties to the tobacco industry as well. In March 2008, Black left his BKSH position to work full time for the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain. When Senator McCain's relationship with telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman was questioned in early 2008, Black "made the rounds of television networks to defend McCain.Black's lobbying clients at one time included General Motors, United Technologies, JPMorgan and AT&T.
Black's relationship with McCain goes back more than twenty years, from the time McCain first came to Washington. They got to know each other well during (former Senator Phil) Gramm's 1996 presidential run. Gramm, the architect of deregulation which led to Enron and the subprime mortgage meltdown in later years, and now an investment banker, who has lately stepped down as official adviser to McCain because under fire in the press, but Mr. Gramm continues on in an unofficial capacity as a supporter of the Bush presidential campaign.. Black drew fire recently when he suggested that a terror attack would help John McCain, but maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. Black’s past is littered with questionable associations with comrades from a 1970s young-conservatives group that has chalked up quite a questionable record in the years since.
Black went on to co-found the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the group that put slime-slinging “independent” groups on the map. His lobbying firm became embroiled in scandal, accused of using political favors to waste taxpayer money. What binds Black’s motley array of pals is a persistent derision for the notion that government might someday be conducted on the level.
Randy Scheunemann served as McCain's campaign foreign policy advisor in 2000 and is back in 2008, despite lobbying in the interim. Until May, Scheunemann was lobbying for the Republic of Georgia - earning more than $800,000 in the process - yet now in August, he's advising McCain on the conflict between Georgia and Russia. Scheunemann's other notable lobbying stints include putting his McCain ties to use in 2006 advising Greenberg Traurig, Jack Abramoff's former firm, as McCain served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, charged with investigating Abramoff.
Ralph Reed: McCain has also enlisted Abramoff crony Ralph Reed to raise money for his campaign. Abramoff directed at least $4.2 million to Reed as he defrauded his clients, yet as chair, McCain never called Reed to testify before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs during the Abramoff investigation. Lately,Reed's helping McCain fundraise, sending emails with the subject line "special invitation from Ralph Reed" to recruit donors to join him at McCain's fundraiser in Atlanta - and McCain is ignoring calls from nonpartisan watchdog groups to cancel the fundraiser.
Giuseppe "Joe" Bonano and the Bonano crime family: In 1995, McCain sent birthday regards to Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonano, the head of the New York Bonano crime family, who had retired to Arizona. McCain also sent regrets for not attending Bonano’s birthday party. Another politician to send regrets was Arizona Governor Fife Symington, who has since been kicked out of office and convicted of 7 felonies relating to fraud and extortion. A quick search on OpenSecrets.org revealed that at least five members of the Bonano family made generous donations ($2,100 each) to the McCain campaign. Each member made a donation that was $200 less than the federal maximum on the same day.