On Wednesday night, a little reporting about the real John McCain made it past the McCain campaign’s carpetbombing of lies against Barack Obama. Predictably, the story, which came from The Nation magazine and MSNBC’S “Rachel Maddow Show,” has otherwise been ignored by the corporate media since then:

RACHEL MADDOW: So, we’re on the air three days so far and we’ve already got ourselves an exclusive. It’s a photographic image that appears to undercut the well-crafted focus group-tested image of John McCain being pushed on the American people by his campaign. The next time you hear McCain described as anti-lobbyist reformer, the man fighting against entrenched interests in Washington, who rebuffed celebrity, perhaps this is the photo that should come to mind.

Now, this was obtained exclusively by the “Nation Magazine” … The magazine reports that it was taken on August 29th, 2006 in Montenegro … On the right hand side, that appears to be John McCain in the purple baseball cap. Purple is the color of his beloved Arizona Diamondbacks, I’m just saying.

And you’re probably thinking to yourself, you know, that guy on the left looks kind of familiar and so doest [sic] the woman who’s with him. The woman there is Hollywood star, Ann Hathaway—“Princess Diaries,” “Devil Wears Prada” [and “Brokeback Mountain”]. The guy on the left is her then-boyfriend, Italian entrepreneur, Raffaello Follieri. The reason that Raffaello looks familiar is because he pled guilty today to a conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud, and five counts of money laundering. He is headed for the crowbar hotel, the pokey.

The feds busted Mr. Follieri because he posed as the CFO of the Vatican in order to win friends in high places and then take their money. That takes us back to the photo. Why exactly is the senior senator from Arizona apparently boarding this yacht in Montenegro on his 70th birthday with a soon to be busted Italian conman?

Well, despite marketing himself as the anti-lobbyist, John McCain, in fact, has a campaign run by one of the biggest names in Washington lobbying, Rick Davis. And Davis has a rolodex full of high powered friends like Raffaello Follieri, the conman, who—“The Nation” reports—hired Rick Davis’ business partner shortly after this photo on the yacht was taken.

Imagine, dear reader, the brouhaha we’d be hearing if a photo surfaced of Barack Obama boarding a yacht with a conman, a lobbyist and Hollywood star. But why are we surprised that there hasn’t been a peep about this in the MSM since Maddow reported it Wednesday night? There is a reason McCain calls the corporate media his base.

Follieri’s victim was Ron Burkle, the entrepreneur who made a billion dollars by making Ralph’s Supermarkets ubitquious, whose primary residence is Green Acres, the Beverly Hills estate built by Silent film star Harold Lloyd, but who is probably best known as an FOB, friend of Bill Clinton’s. Follieri took Burkle for $50 million:

Italian real estate developer Raffaello Follieri pleaded guilty for his involvement in the so-called Vati-Con scandal, a scheme in which he misappropriated a $50 million investment from California billionaire Ronald Burkle meant to buy up abandoned Roman Catholic properties in the United States.

Follieri pleaded guilty to 14 federal charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy in Manhattan District Court on Wednesday. Thus, Follieri struck a deal with prosecutors which effectively limits his maximum sentencing time to five years and three months in prison, down from around nine should have he stood trial.

Raffaello Follieri agreed to repay $2.4 million and forfeit 12 watches and nine pieces of jewelry and will be sentenced on Oct. 3.

And:

Apparently, he lied to investors that he was the Vatican’s chief financial officer and had the ear of Pope Benedict XVI. It seems that the efforts he made to pose as a Vatican insider went as far as him displaying Vatican robes in his office and asking a priest to appear wearing a robe above his rank in order to give him more credit.

Rick Davis is currently the CEO of the McCain campaign, but his real job is as a lobbyist for the K Street firm, Davis, Manafort & Freedman, which is the current formulation of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, which was founded 28 years ago by McCain senior adviser, Charlie Black, one of the originators of Republican the smear and slime attack method of politics that has been so wonderfully successful for the GOP and corporate America but that has driven the country into a ditch. The “Stone” in Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, is Roger Stone, the Southern Florida sleazy GOP operative who, for example, earlier this year launched an anti-Hillary Clinton website, with the acronym C.U.N.T.

One of Rick Davis’ more notable accomplishments is having successfully lobbied for the merger of shipping services DHL from Germany and Airborne Express from the United States in 2003. The merger put 8,000 Ohioans out of work.

Heckuva job, Rick!