Cindy McCain Is Sooo Great

I recently received an email touting the inherent goodness, purity, grace, poise, character, ethics, beauty, intelligence, wit, and perhaps even penmanship of Cindy McCain.  You can read it at Snopes.com, which attests to the truth of every statement in that email.

And that's great.  Really, it's wonderful that the woman with whom John McCain had an adulterous affair is such a good person.  I'm truly happy that Cindy McCain's inherited wealth funded John McCain's first Congressional campaign even with their prenuptial agreement that keeps their finances "separate."  And who wouldn't be pleased to know that Cindy McCain's "separate" finances have provided John McCain's campaign with private jets and the homes in which he entertains the journalists assigned to his campaign?

I'm also sure that further evidence of Cindy McCain's fundamental goodness can be found in the way she and her father invested over $300,000 in a shopping center being built by Charles Keating - the largest single investment in a $15 million project.  Since the McCain's keep John's political duties rigorously separate from their personal lives  - why, Cindy and the kids live in Arizona! - I'm sure that this investment, coming as it did a mere year before John's involvement in the Keating Five, had nothing to do with why he became involved, nothing to do with why John stuck with Keating long after everyone else had thrown him under the bus.

Yes, Cindy McCain abused Percocet and Vicodin, stealing pills from the charity she ran to feed her addiction.  But many very good people abuse these drugs - look at Rush Limbaugh!  I think it's fair to say that Cindy McCain and Rush Limbaugh are quite a bit alike.  Perhaps Rush, were he to spend time with Cindy, would not find John McCain such a detestable politician.

The above has been sarcastic and snarky, of course.  I'd like to change the tone, however, and discuss one thing about John McCain and his family seriously.  It's about the little girl they adopted from Bangladesh.  I think that's wonderful, I really do.

But in 2000, during the GOP primary campaign in South Carolina, the George W. Bush political machine started a whisper campaign declaring that this little girl was the product of an affair that McCain was having with a black woman.  As evidence that the list of nasty, evil people in the GOP is not exhausted by their politicians and paid campaign staff, this rumor was enough to doom McCain's chances in SC and ultimately the entire primary.

The Bush campaign tried to think of the worst insult they could, the most damaging thing they could say and do to beat McCain.  Their idea was to go after his daughter and his relationship with his wife.  Never mind that to progressives that "insult" should at least sound ridiculous.  It's the intent that matters.  Aside from putting George Bush on the path to the GOP nomination, that smear job resulted in something else, something that we've all seen many times. 

Yes, that's John McCain acting like a puppy dog to the man who brought the McCain family into a political campaign, who lied about that family, who insulted them in the worst way he could.  The thousand words in that picture are really just one word repeated a thousand times:  betrayed.  John McCain betrayed his daughter with that embarrassing display.  John McCain told his daughter that his ambition to become President ranks higher than she does.  And the fact that Cindy McCain allowed such a thing to happen is as much of a betrayal.

We'll spend a lot of time talking about policies, about how McCain is even more ignorant of the situation in Iraq than Bush, about the seemingly infinite number of times McCain has opposed his own rhetoric, decisions and laws he wrote.  That's fine.  But as we've seen many times, one of the big factors in choosing a President is this vague notion of "character," of moral fiber.

John McCain publicly betrayed his own daughter, and has done it again and again in the way he has tied himself not only to Bush's policies, but to George W. Bush the person.  Harry Truman, while he was President, threatened to beat up a newspaper reviewer who gave a bad review to Truman's daughter.  Tactless, to be sure, impolitic of course.  But evidence of priorities in the right place, of a man who at least knew the value of his own child.  John and Cindy McCain apparently don't value their child that much, and for that if for nothing else, they deserve to not only be denied the White House, but to be driven from public office, to live out their lives covered in the shame they so richly deserve.

Comments

[Sir Charles]

If St. John did it, it is per se justifiable. Ask Chris Matthews.

Not only did Truman threaten to beat up the critic, I believe he threatened to knee him in the nuts -- the qote "I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose, plenty of beefsteak and perhap a supporter below."

God I love that man.

[Sprezzatura]

Someone in my family had a brush with addiction to Percocet and Vicodin in the not too distant past. You'd be surprised how easy it can be to get addicted to those drugs, aided and abetted by your own doctors.

I'm all for going after Cindy McCain for a lot of things, but perhaps we might leave demonizing addiction off the list. It can happen to anyone, Democrat or Republican.

[Sir Charles]

Sprezz,

All well and good to be compassionate towards addiction -- however, as I noted earlier, does anyone in his right mind believe that similar forbearance would be shown to Michelle Obama by the Republicans?

Moreover, all of these clowns -- McCain, LImbaugh, et al., support the "war on drugs" and the draconian penalties given to people of the wrong color or socioeconomic group. So I view Cindypills as fair game until such time as she and her husband advocate for similarly tolerate treatment of those who are guilty of the same sins as her.

[Toast]

That is indeed quite a picture. It reminds me of the one taken back in March where Hillary Clinton is sitting across from Richard Mellon Scaife.

[Stephen]

Sprezz,

I included the addiction because she stole from her own charity, not because of the addiction per se.

It reminds me of the one taken back in March where Hillary Clinton is sitting across from Richard Mellon Scaife.

I'm not sure why. Hillary's intent was obviously to co-opt a powerful and persistent enemy. She was wrong in how effective such an attempt would be, of course, but she hasn't been running around the country singing Scaife's praises and tying herself to his policies, either.

In fact, from a family betrayal perspective, there wouldn't be anything wrong with McCain flip-flopparooing again to embrace all of Bush's policies. It's the way he's embraced, literally and figuratively, George W. Bush the man with which I have a problem.

[Corvus9]

Sir Charles, I would just like to say that I too, think that Truman line is awesome, and I bemoan the loss of the ability of Presidents to threaten to personally kick someone's ass. It just seems like something has been lost, is all.

You know who Cindy McCain reminds me of? Every time I see a picture of her, I think of Cersei Lannister, from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (don't ruin anything, I'm in the middle of book 2!). Which is another way of saying I find Cindy McCain really, really scary.

[Matt Weiner]

I think, as far as John McCain's fitness to serve as President goes, this is the most substantive thing to say about Cindy:

a) All the couple's assets are in her name
b) She won't release her tax returns, so we don't know what their business dealings are
c) As the Keating scandal shows, the McCains have a history of doing their corrupt business dealings through her.