Buy a big house

I'm just trying to make sure I understand this.

John McCain's pander, um, plan (plander?) - as McCain pointed out, it's not That One's plan or George Bush's plan - to save the economy that he snidely introduced at the second debate is to spend an additional $300 billion dollars to buy out mortgages and issue new, lower mortgages with lower principal amounts to people who cannot afford their existing mortgage.

So, in short, he's encouraging people to buy too much house that they cannot afford, because if they cannot, the government will step in and pay off enough so that the home is affordable. He would hand taxpayer money (or print new money and create inflationary pressure) over to irresponsible borrowers and reckless, incompetent or corrupt bankers. If Barack Obama suggested anything like this, he would get pilloried. But I guess you have to play to your base, don't you?

Is there anything McCain will not say to try to win this election, and does he ever think before he says anything?

I also note that the Ann Curry interrupted Joe Biden this morning on the Today show to talk about McCain's silly proposal, and claimed that Senator Obama didn't have a counterproposal - as if he should have a prepared counterproposal to a completely idiotic proposal - showing how she understands issues as poorly as Tom Brokaw. Here's the clip:

(To be clear, other than the fact that it involves an attempt to address problem mortgages, McCain's plan bears no relation to what I reluctantly proposed a couple of weeks ago as a preferable option to the bailout proposal that was on the table - I never suggested forgiving the obligations of home buyers who couldn't afford their mortgages; instead, the government would have been buying the paper and foreclosing on those mortgages so that the government owned the property, then creating an opportunity for the home owner to rent and possibly buy back in when the market made sense economically to do so. My plan required responsibility and spread pain, created incentives for the free market to take the place of the government, and did not reward bad behavior of either the banks or the borrowers. McCain's plan fails miserably on all of those points. But, as McCain would have told you in the past, he really does not understand economics.)

Update: We find ourselves in remarkable times when the National Review and I are in almost complete agreement.