The smokescreen of "family values" surrounding the distasteful activities of our Republican candidates isn't all that hard to penetrate. Perhaps that's why they have to distract us with constant spurious and concocted attacks on their competitors. Take Cindy McCain's smug little off-center quip that followed Michelle Obama's statement about being really proud of her country for the first time in her adult life: "I don't know about you, if you heard those words earlier, I am very proud of my country." I'm still hearing comments unfavorable to Obama resulting from that, but I'm hearing no comments at all about how proud Cindy founded a charity and used it to steal drugs to feed her habit. Until today I heard nothing about how she payed a doctor to make out prescriptions for her own use in the names of charity employees and summarily fired one Tom Gosinski when he objected to being used as an accessory.
Ariel Levy's New Yorker article on Cindy relates how the McCains retaliated against Gosinski when he rightly filed a wrongful termination of employment suit. The doctor of course lost his license, Gosinski lost his job, while McCain cooly avoided any unpleasant side effects from her multiple felonies and any damage to her flawless makeup. It's good to be rich and white, ask Rush Limbaugh who did much the same thing.
Cindy McCain has been described as being very concerned with secrecy. Perhaps we can begin to understand why when we discover that Cindy, who is fond of calling herself an only child, has two half sisters. Being an only child serves to diminish discussion of why Cindy inherited her father's fortune while her father's other daughter got ten thousand dollars -- and of course it hints at why Cindy avoids her sister or any discussion of possible unfairness resulting from some inexplicable family value. It doesn't explain how she could smoothly eulogize her father's generosity at his funeral and claim to be an only child while her disinherited sister sat there sobbing. However much she values family, one is tempted to think that she values something else far, far more.
Those Americans sober enough to remember John's first run for the presidency remember how the family values party smeared him with allegations of having an illegitimate daughter by a black woman. Of course the daughter in question was an orphan from Pakistan whom Cindy brought home from a trip claiming Mother Theresa asked her to. It would have been a moving story if Mother Theresa had actually been at that orphanage.
Cindy's a Republican. As a Republican, you say what sounds good and you do what you do in secret and you scream at the "biased" press when you trip on the facts. As a newly minted Republican saint, she has enough hounds at her side to drown out any protest with their barking.
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2 comments:
All this is information is fair game in our current conversation -- McCain ran a bizarre ad not long ago that pointed to Obama's half brother in Kenya, who lives in poverty, and asked us to consider what that meant regarding Obama's true "family values." I've never heard that Cindy McCain is NOT an only child, and now I have to read the article you linked to, since you're right -- I was absolutely aware that she was an only child since that's been a prominent point in her biography.
I was also shocked to read, toward the very end of a very long story about John McCain, that he has never been baptized. I wonder how many Christianist know that. From what I understand of their dogma, it would be a deal breaker, but I suspect they've never heard about that for the same reasons I only just discovered it -- because it reveals a truth about McCain that he's successfully managed to squelch.
Again, this makes zero difference to me, but he's very suddenly begun to discuss regularly his relationship with God, so I think since he's milking that for all it's worth (i.e. votes from a certain quarter of the electorate), then let's have that conversation.
Both the McCains hide behind a professionally crafted facade. Palin's was put up with all haste and looks more like a false front you'd see on some western movie set. Maybe that's why they're so much in a panic and calling us all deranged when we want to look through the windows.
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