“If Sarah Palin has noth­ing to hide, if she’s not a Ter­ror­ist, why would she mind any­one going through her emails? And just because these things — those things that some overly-​​earnest peo­ple call “statutes” or “laws” or what­ever the new trendy Left­ist term for them is today — say that you can’t invade people’s pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions with­out com­mit­ting a crime, does any­one other than shrill Left­ists really take that seri­ously, really think that some­one who does what the law says you can’t do should get in trou­ble or — more absurdly still — be arrested?”

“[in 1999] …McCain had joined with other Repub­li­cans to push through land­mark leg­is­la­tion spon­sored by then-​​Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an eco­nomic adviser to his cam­paign. The Gramm-​​Leach-​​Bliley Act aimed to make the country’s finan­cial insti­tu­tions com­pet­i­tive by remov­ing the Depression-​​era walls between bank­ing, invest­ment and insur­ance companies.

That bill allowed AIG to par­tic­i­pate in the gold rush of a rapidly expand­ing global bank­ing and invest­ment mar­ket. But the leg­is­la­tion also helped pave the way for com­pa­nies such as AIG and Lehman Broth­ers to become behe­moths laden with bad loans and investments.

McCain now con­demns the exec­u­tives at those com­pa­nies for pur­su­ing the ambi­tions that the Gramm-​​Leach-​​Bliley Act made pos­si­ble, say­ing that “in an end­less quest for easy money, they dreamed up invest­ment schemes that they them­selves don’t even understand.””