As a rule, politicians are shocking populists and John McCain is no exception by telling The Wall Street Journal that he would sack Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox.

If nothing else, McCain showed he is totally clueless about the way the market works:

"The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino," McCain says. "They allowed naked short selling-which simply means that you can sell stock without ever owning it. They eliminated last year the uptick rule that has protected investors for 70 years. Speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground."

Whatever might be said about the short sellers, it's not the reason the US capital market and economy is in such serious trouble.

"The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president and has betrayed the public's trust. If I were president today, I would fire him."

Cox has put out a statement defending himself. It's true that the SEC could have done more to prevent the crisis, and its hand-off approach was misplaced. But despite these shortcomings, McCain is not letting the truth get in the way of his political game playing. For a start, the SEC has never actually condoned naked short selling. And secondly, as the ABC News points out, the US President does not have the power to sack the commissioner of an independent regulatory commission.

Of course, populism and looking for scapegoats is part of politics. But what does it say about the man who would run the country?