During an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board yesterday, John McCain - presumably making an attempt at humor - said with a completely straight face that he aspired to be a dictator, while decrying the Congressional rejection of the bailout bill.

“I just want to make a comment about the obvious issue and that is the failure of Congress to act yesterday. Its just not acceptable,” said McCain. “This is just a not acceptable situation. I’m not saying this is the perfect answer. If I were dictator, which I always aspire to be, I would write it a little bit differently.”

McCain has urged the Bush administration to bypass the will of Congress and invoke executive orders to pass the bailout bill, along with a further $1 trillion dollar spend on buying up bad mortgage debt.

McCain’s senior economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin has also called on the executive branch to ignore Congress and force through the bailout legislation, which was voted down on Monday.

Another senior economic advisor to McCain, Phil Gramm, vice chairman of UBS’s US division and a lobbyist for UBS, successfully pushed for foreign banks to be included in the bailout plan after they were initially excluded.

The fact that McCain said he yearned to be a dictator without so much as cracking a smile makes the comment all the more disturbing especially in comparison to similar sentiments expressed at least three times by George W. Bush.

Bush infamously said, “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator,” during a December 2000 speech.

He also remarked, “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it,” in a July 2001 Business Week interview.

When Bush was Governor of Texas in 1998 he stated, “You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.”