McCain blames "greedy" Wall Street investors for recession

This is just amazing. I found this through Americablog yesterday, with the source story coming from The Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain this morning said "greedy" Wall Street investors are partly to blame for what he said is probably an economic recession the nation is now suffering.

"There has to be a modification of the greedy behavior of some of these people," he said, using the word "greedy" repeatedly in remarks to the Associated Press annual meeting at the Washington Convention Center today.

John McCain is now blaming "greedy" Wall Street investors for causing the economic recession that the U.S. is now it--John McCain is now an economic populist! And you can bet that it was the same "greedy" Wall Street investors that jumped on to the subprime mortgage bandwagon, pushing a lot of the mortgage-backed investment securities that are now worthless and are creating huge losses among the same big Wall Street investment firms--Investment firms like Bear Stearns, which the Federal Reserve has bailed out. Of course, Senator John McCain supports the Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns:

Asked whether the Fed went too far in helping Bear Stearns, McCain said: "It's a close call, but I don't think so." He said he doesn't support federal bailouts unless it has catastrophic effects on the entire financial marketplace and there were indications that a Bear Stearns failure would have rippled across the entire economy.

So even though McCain blames the greed of Wall Street, he is still willing to allow the American taxpayer to bail out the excessive greed of Wall Street, even as that same greed has resulted in a financial market meltdown. Is it my imagination, or is McCain actually rewarding Wall Street investors for their greed? This is just blatant hypocrisy on McCain's part.

This is election year politics that John McCain is playing with--even as he blatantly denies playing such election year politics in this ThinkProgress video. The McCain campaign knows that they have to play some type of populist role, as the polls are showing that American believe the country is on the wrong track, and Americans struggling in a stagnating U.S. economy. So the McCain campaign is shifting its economic message of blaming "greedy" Wall Street investors as a means of courting votes from Americans who are angry over the financial meltdown due to the mortgage mess, and perhaps blame Wall Street for their role in this mess. But this is only campaign talk. Because even as McCain rails against the same Wall Street investors, he has acknowledged that he will continue to bail out those same investors and speculators that he has railed against.