Take John McCain, for example. Or should that be Saint John McCain, the newly-anointed Patron Saint of the
#Resistance? You know, the rabidly bloodthirsty warmongering neocon who the mouthpiece lapdog fake news lying establishment bankster-funded corporate dinosaur lamestream media fell over themselves to hail as one of the greatest statesman who ever lived after his recent death?
Now there are
many reprehensible incidents from McCain's ignominious career that were studiously ignored in the torrent of retch-inducing encomia that accompanied his passing, but for our purposes today one scandal in particular stands out. Back in the 1980s a scandal erupted around Charles H. Keating, Jr., Chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which had
come under scrutiny from government regulators for its part in the savings and loan crisis.
Keating had responded to the unwelcome attention of government regulators by doing what any other businessman in his situation would do: attempt to buy off the regulators. (After all, this is precisely what the
government regulation trap has been
designed for.) And so he spent $1.3 million lining the pockets of five US Senators (the "Keating Five") to help him get the regulators off his back. They all happily accepted his money and—wouldn't you know?—the regulators did back off their investigation of Lincoln.
The plot finally blew up after two years of sporadic coverage in the press and it kicked off a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into the actions of the five senators who had taken Keating's bribes. Naturally (for those of you who don't know the punchline yet), one of those senators was none other than Saint McCain himself.
Of course, the Senate Ethics Committee eventually
cleared McCain of wrongdoing (while chiding him for "poor judgement"), but it was
widely reported at the time that McCain had improperly leaked details to the press about his fellow senators in order to throw the blame on them (and thus exonerate himself). While that's bad enough, the real crime came when he lied about these leaks under oath. But since history is written by the winners—which today means the editors of Wikipedia—the official history of the Keating Five prominently notes McCain's official exoneration and buries the
official accusations of perjury in the
second-to-last paragraph of the lengthy article.
For Saint John McCain, crime most certainly did pay.
been there done that 
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