The Straight Talk Express is now the Lobbyists Express..climb onboard!

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Steve Benen, the talented purveyor of the Carpetbagger Report has an educational post up this fine but freaking wet Saturday morning. It's entitled: Lobbying, influence peddling aboard the 'Straight Talk Express'. Reading his writeup, we learn the following from a WaPo article:

Of all the lobbyists involved in the McCain campaign, the most prominent is [Charles] Black, who has made a lucrative career of shuttling back and forth between presidential politics and big-time Washington lobbying…. [E]ven as Black provides a private voice and a public face for McCain, he also leads his lobbying firm, which offers corporate interests and foreign governments the promise of access to the most powerful lawmakers. Some of those companies have interests before the Senate and, in particular, the Commerce Committee, of which McCain is a member.

Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain's Straight Talk Express bus. (emphasis mine)

Oh dear..that isn't good now is it? Doing business out of the bus? For McCain to actually rail against lobbyists when in fact his campaign is packed to the rafters with the bastards..says what about him? Again from the WaPo article:

But when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae.


Thats quite a laundry list of lobbyists wouldn't you say? Again..what does this list of lobbyists tell us about Weathervane McCain? That he is a lying sack of sheep shit? That he has the beginnings of Alzheimers? That he rates the intelligence quotient of voters along the same lines as Bush does, meaning equal to a dandelion?

The NYT's little expose about McCain is now starting to make sense I think. They were raising a red flag about the hypocrisy of McCain if nothing else. They just didn't do a very good job of it.

Tags: McCain, Lobbyists