After today's self-defeatingly ridiculous attack on the New York Times by McCain aide Steve Schmidt, the Obama campaign retorted with a semi-complaint that, while the paper has scrubbed Obama's record, it has't written a story about McCain's role in the Keating Five-S&L scandal.
But actually, the Times has done that, more or less. One of the (many) weird aspects of the paper's explosive Vicki Iseman bombshell last February was how the salacious sex talk was essentially the creamy filling of a stale donut baked from McCain's Keating Five history.
And, any qualms about the Iseman angle aside, the story remains a pretty good Keating-McCain primer.
P.S. This isn't to say that the Keating Five doesn't merit revisiting, by the Times or anyone else. McCain never took any scandalous action, it was a long time ago, and he's done more repenting than most politicians would--but the tale's relevance has clearly shot up the chart in the past week or two.
--Michael Crowley