Saturday, October 18, 2008

Cindy McCain

"The two often relax in separate places: Mr. McCain prefers the family’s ranch in the Arizona desert, while Mrs. McCain’s refuge is a high-rise condominium on the Pacific. "
New York Times

So the McCains are separated, not hard to do when you have eight homes. I don't really care, but the media have no problem picking and choosing whom they will scrutinize and whom they will not. The New York Times wrote a truly tawdry, unseemly article on Bill and Hillary Clinton last year, claiming that the public were interested in their private lives, a specious argument at best.

"Four other senators were implicated, and one Senate spouse: Mrs. McCain. She and her father had invested in a shopping center with Mr. Keating, and while Mr. McCain insisted that he had reimbursed Mr. Keating for vacations their families had taken together in the Bahamas, he said his wife, the family bookkeeper, could not find the receipts."

Remember the Keating scandal? It was yesteryear's financial crisis, with the taxpayers bailing out the savings and loan industry. McCain used his influence to help one crook in particular, Charles Keating. I had never read before that Cindy McCain and her family had a personal interest in this scandal, so the Times was correct in pointing it out.

Glenn Greenwald, who alternates between good investigative journalism and useless namby pamby liberalism, takes the Times to task for the story. I disagree strongly. Candidates for public office give up their privacy, and someone who has half-siblings yet describes herself as an only child ought to be called on her lie. The Times pointed out that the McCains lie about their private life when they claim to be a married couple and that his wife profited from the savings and loan thievery. Cindy McCain has also injected herself into the campaign, it was she who first posited that Alaska's proximity to Russia gave Sarah Palin foreign policy credentials.

Greenwald and his ilk are a huge problem. He did great reporting on Obama's FISA treachery, but then rejected the notion that progressives ought to withhold support from him because of it. We should just accept the loss of our constitutional rights, hold our noses, and vote for the "lesser" of two evils. Although if democratic presidential candidates think we have no fourth amendment rights, their evil isn't any less.

At any rate, I'm glad the times exposed the Cindy McCain fraud.

"Cindy McCain was new to Washington and not yet 30 when she arrived at a luncheon for Congressional spouses to discover a problem with her name tag.

It read “Carol McCain.” That was the well-liked wife John McCain had left to marry Cindy, to the disapproval of many in Washington."

Married woman don't like home wreckers. Thank goodness.