Accountability, accountability, accountability. It’s amazing the word doesn’t stick in the candidates’ craws. Responding to the Wall Street crash on Monday, John McCain declared that, “The McCain-Palin administration will bring transparency and accountability to Wall Street, we will bring transparency and accountability and we will reform the regulatory bodies of government." 

It’s not only Wall Street that needs some accountability. If there’s one person McCain could rightly hold responsible for loosening the restraints on Wall Street, it’s his own economic advisor, Phil Gramm, — the man who called Americans worried about the economy "Whiners." As chair of the Senate banking committee, Gramm’s responsible for slipping into a banking bill the ok for a new credit default insurance policy or credit swap, that gave large financial institutions the incentive to give out ever riskier loans because those loans could be turned into securities and sold. The market in so called swaps — utterly unregulated — is at the heart of what took Lehman Brothers down.

McCain’s still praising Gramm at fundraisers — and Ron Paul says Gramm called him recently seeking his endorsement of McCain. No accountability there.

Nor on the Palin front. McCain’s running mate was also out there preaching transparency and accountability yesterday — at the very same time that her campaign was telling the press that the Governor won’t, after all, be cooperating with her own State’s investigation into what looks like a politically motivated firing of the pubic safety commissioner. Having said she’d cooperate, Palin’s now saying she won’t.

Forgive me if I’m missing something here, but isn’t this the Party that preaches  Personal Responsibility? I guess they’re all for personal responsibility — but only for other persons.