What you write on Friday may come back to haunt you on Monday

John McCain should know this. It is taught at the US Naval Academy to every midshipman. This often refers to late-night letters impetuously written about a specific policy which, once dawn breaks, is best burned rather than delivered.

We bloggers often get caught in this trap and I stand as living proof of one who sends a series of irate words down the "publish" t00bs only to regret them eight hours later. But then, I'm not running for President of the United States. In fact, I'm not running for anything.

John McCain, who I am sure understands the principle of re-reading those bits of conservative ideology sent out for publication, is running for POTUS and in that regard should be aware of events going on around him, particularly when the country he's asking people to let him lead has been in a year-long and increasingly dangerous financial melt-down.

So you have to ask, what the hell McCain was thinking when he wrote this in the latest edition of Contingencies, the journal of the American Academy of Actuaries. (Emphasis mine)

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

The evidence of the runaway corruption and excesses of an unregulated banking system has been laying in a bloody mess on the public sidewalks for at least a year now. Anybody with a functioning synapse could see that it was only a matter of time before the corpses of the American banking system, let off the leash by Republican free-market ideology, would start to pile up on the Main Streets of America.

Yet, McCain's comparison was published in the September/October 2008 edition of Contingencies with no regard to the financial mess that was going on all around him while he wrote.

As of today the 12th American bank was closed by regulators this calendar year and more if you go back twelve months.

Would you want to put the health care system in the hands of this cognitively challenged fool?

More from Paul Krugman.
H/T Crooks and Liars