Yesterday, McCain’s senior campaign advisor, Steve Schmidt, said that “Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be.” Today, the Gray Lady responded in kind.

WASHINGTON — One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years.

That company was Freddy Mac, and Rick Davis has received obscene compensation to represent the mortgage industry in exchange for basically nothing, no work, just access to John McCain.

This goes back all the way to 2000.

Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the two people said.

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than to speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, had been kept on the payroll because of his close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House.

How much did McCain campaign manager Rick Davis receive to do no work?

As president of the Homeownership Alliance, Mr. Davis received $30,000 to $35,000 a month. He, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have characterized the alliance as a coalition of many housing industry and consumer groups to promote homeownership, but numerous current and former officials at both companies say the companies created and bankrolled the operation to combat efforts by competitors to rein in their business. The companies dissolved the group at the end of 2005 as part of cost-cutting in the wake of accounting scandals and, at Freddie Mac, a lobbying scandal that forced out its top Republican lobbyist.

John McCain has staffed his campaign with people that were being bribed (essentially) to do the bidding of a mortgage industry that has run the U.S. economy onto the shoals. And John McCain wants us to ignore that and trust him to clean up the mess?

Please.