Better Know a McCain: Cindy edition

This doesn’t necessarily speak to John McCain’s fitness for the Presidency, but it is a fascinating peek into his wife’s psyche. Some family values, eh?

From NPR:

Last Tuesday, NPR broadcast a story about Cindy McCain’s business and charity work. In it, Ted Robbins described McCain as the only child of Jim Hensley, a wealthy Arizona businessman. The next morning, NPR received an e-mail from Nicholas Portalski of Phoenix, who heard the story with his mother.

“We were listening to the piece about Cindy McCain on NPR, All Things Considered, and it just struck us very hard,” Portalski said.

His mother, Kathleen Hensley Portalski, is also Hensley’s daughter.

The Portalski family is accustomed to hearing Cindy McCain described as Hensley’s only child.

She’s been described that way by news organizations from The New Yorker and The New York Times to Newsweek and ABC.

McCain herself routinely uses the phrase “only child,” as she did on CNN last month. “I grew up with my dad,” she said then. “I’m an only child. My father was a cowboy, and he really loved me very much, but I think he wanted a son occasionally.”

McCain’s father was also a businessman ‚Äî and twice a father.

Read the whole thing to get a full picture of Hensley’s douchiness.


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10 responses to “Better Know a McCain: Cindy edition”

  1. jkga Avatar
    jkga

    I can see that it would be convenient to describe oneself as an only child to avoid getting into complicated explanations of family dynamics. But apparently (this was in the Sunday NYT, IIRC) Cindy McCain described herself as an only child while speaking at her father’s wake, with her half-sister in the audience. That’s bizarre and disturbing.

  2. Mouth of the South Avatar
    Mouth of the South

    Am I missing something? Is the whole story whether or not Mother Teresa met Cindy McCain?

    If her bio said, “Cindy pushed the old wrinkled woman, who she assumed to be Teresa, to the ground and liberated the baby from that terrible place.” Well then we’d be on to something.

  3. PaulaG Avatar
    PaulaG

    Like I said, I wasn’t suggesting it as campaign issue #1, I just think it provides interesting backstory and illumination as to who these people are. That said, the big difference between the McCain sibling thing and the Obama sibling thing is that Obama didn’t lie/mislead anyone about his family, and in fact has been excruciatingly upfront about the complicated nature of his family (he, you know, like, wrote a whole book about it). Oh, and also, apparently George seems reasonably content with things:

    “But reports surfaced in the past few days, springing from an Italian Vanity Fair article saying George Obama is living in a shack and “earning less than a dollar a day.”

    The reports left him angry.

    “I was brought up well. I live well even now,” he said. “The magazines, they have exaggerated everything.

    “I think I kind of like it here. There are some challenges, but maybe it is just like where you come from, there are the same challenges,” Obama said. . . . He draws inspiration from his famous half-brother. He acknowledges that he is biased but said he knows that his half-brother will be the next president.”

    http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/22/bts.obama.brother/index.html

  4. MelGX Avatar
    MelGX

    Ouch.

  5. shelby Avatar
    shelby

    Hmmm. So is this the kind of story we want to beat a drum with while George Obama might be living in a corrugated metal shack?

  6. J.M. Prince Avatar

    I’m sorry, but we already Know that Cindy McCain is & remains a miserable lying wretch who remains ever willing to fluff & lie Big Time for her decrepit and senile hubby. Even about simple things like family. Even when questioned about it In Church By Rick Warren. They just Had to Lie about it! What would the media have done to either Hillary OR Bill were caught in such a monstrous Personal Lie?? Or the Obamas’??! From the Huffington Post: [August 24, 2008]:

    “Mark Nickolas

    The Anatomy of a Deception: How The McCains Changed Their Baby Adoption Story Just Before 2008 Campaign Began

    Posted August 21, 2008 | 12:32 PM (EST)

    Read More: Adoption, Bridget McCain, Cindy McCain, Cindy Mccain Adoption Story, Cindy Mccain Mother Teresa, Cindy Mccain Mother Teresa Story, Cindy McCain Recipes, John McCain, Mccain Mother Teresa, Mccain Mother Theresa, Mother Teresa, Politics News

    “As was pointed out yesterday by the Christian Science Monitor, the McCain campaign was called out for lying about the purported urging of Cindy McCain by Mother Teresa herself to adopt two children at her orphanage back in 1991. Turns out, McCain never met or even spoke with Mother Teresa on that trip.

    Once confronted by the Monitor about the deception, the campaign quickly erased such claims from the website, as it did with Cindy’s family recipes, which were proved to be lifted from the Food Network.

    But after doing some research, this deception was no careless accident, but rather another shameless and deliberate attempt by the campaign to reinvent and embellish the McCain family history in time for his 2008 presidential bid.

    Here’s how the McCain adoption was described by them prior to the 2008 presidential race:

    Newsweek (Nov. 15, 1999, Cindy McCain’s Own Story):

    On finding a child while running a relief mission to Bangladesh in 1991:

    Story continues below

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    I was working in Dhaka, and a friend of mine from Arizona had said to me, Look, while you’re there, do me a favor. Mother Teresa has an orphanage in Dhaka. Would you mind seeing if they need any help? And I said, Sure. We finally found the orphanage, and we saw 150 newborns on one floor. And a lot of them were sick. And the nuns said, [This little girl with a cleft palate]–can’t you take her and get her medical help? And I thought, well, sure I can, I can do that.

    CNBC (Feb 12, 2000, Tim Russert Interview with the McCains):

    Mrs. McCAIN: She’s–our daughter Bridget is eight years old. I found her in Mother Teresa’s orphanage when she was 10 weeks old in Bangladesh. She has a cleft palate; she had some other problems. And the nuns persuaded me to bring her home, and I did. I–I could do that. I was able to do that. And literally on board the flight home from Bangkok to Los Angeles, not having spoken to my husband, I decided I couldn’t c–I had to–I couldn’t let her go. I had–she chose me. So she’s ours now. I came home and presented my husband with a new daughter that he didn’t know he had.

    Vanity Fair (November 2004, The Trashing of John McCain):

    In 1991, when Cindy McCain was on a relief mission to Bangladesh, she was asked by one of Mother Teresa’s nuns to help a young orphan with a cleft palate. Flying her to the U.S. for surgery, Cindy realized she couldn’t give her up. At the Phoenix airport, she broke it to her husband, and they eventually adopted the child. But few people knew that story. In the words of McCain’s national campaign manager, Rick Davis, a smear doesn’t have “to be true to be effective.”

    Now see how the story changed at the beginning of 2008:

    The Sunday Mail (Feb. 3, 2008, Dark past no barrier for Cindy):

    “While working at Mother Teresa’s orphanage in the early 1990s, I stumbled upon the most beautiful little girl I’d ever seen,” she said. “She had a terrible cleft palate. She had problems with her feet. She had problems with her hands. She had all kinds of problems.

    “As only Mother Teresa can, she prevailed upon me to take this baby and another baby to the United States for medical care.”

    The Sunday Telegraph (Feb. 3, 2008, Cindy McCain: pills, ills, beer and the White House)

    It was on a trip to Bangladesh in 1991 that she adopted Bridget. On Friday she recounted to voters in Missouri and Illinois how Mother Teresa persuaded her to return home with the child. “I just could not let her go. The only thing was, I had not told my husband. When I got back, he asked me ‘Where will she go?’ and I said: ‘I thought she could come to our house.’

    Digital Journal (Jun 15, 2008, Can We Trust Cindy McCain to Represent American Women?):

    Mrs. McCain has been involved in charity work from clearing landmines, to starting a charity to help children who need facial reconstruction. She has been inspired by her daughter she adopted from Bangladesh who needed extreme care after being born with a cleft palate. The adoption was prompted by Mother Teresa herself who implored Cindy to adopt the little girl. She did so without first consulting John McCain because of her compassion for the girl and her respect for Mother Teresa.

    But the most damning evidence of a deliberate attempt to concoct this story comes from cached versions of the McCain campaign website.

    Here’s how Cindy’s campaign bio reads on the website as late as November 9, 2004:

    As an advocate for children’s health care needs, Cindy H. McCain founded the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) in 1988. The AVMT provided emergency medical and surgical care to impoverished children throughout the world. Cindy led 55 medical missions to third world and war-torn countries during AVMT’s seven years of existence. During one of those missions, on a visit to Mother Teresa’s Orphanage Cindy agreed to bring two babies in need of medical attention back to the United States. One of those babies is now a happy and healthy little girl named Bridget McCain.

    Now compare that to the change made on the website on February 3, 2008 — the same day the stories above by The Sunday Mail and The Sunday Telegraph were printed:

    As an advocate for children’s health care needs, Cindy founded and ran the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) from 1988 to 1995. AVMT provided emergency medical and surgical care to impoverished children throughout the world. Cindy led 55 medical missions to third world and war-torn countries during AVMT’s seven years of existence. On one of those missions, Mother Teresa convinced Cindy to take two babies in need of medical attention to the United States. One of those babies is now their adopted daughter, 15 year old Bridget McCain.

    Notice the obvious change in the one sentence that depicts the circumstances of the adoption.

    The instances of the dishonest efforts to create a McCain family portrait are growing. The campaign previously had to scrub its website of Cindy’s family recipes when it was discovered in April that they were largely cut and paste from the Food Network.

    At the time, they blamed an intern for the problem. I wonder who they will now blame for Cindy McCain’s own words?

    Are these indicative of the McCain family values?

    UPDATE: Seems that Rick Warren told Larry King on Monday night that the Mother Teresa story was one of three times during Saturday’s forum that McCain teared-up. They’re liars and actors.

    Mark Nickolas is the Managing Editor of Political Base, and this story was from his original post, “The Anatomy of a Deception: How The McCains Changed Their Baby Adoption Story Just Before 2008 Bid”

    Just so you know… Cheers, JMP

  7. jac1975 Avatar
    jac1975

    Gotta love hateful parents. And as an only child, we’re not ALL assholes who never learned to share, didn’t know how to lose at games, didn’t find out about compromise, or have a host of other personality disorders. Some of us came out of an only childhood OK. Just sayin…

  8. MelGX Avatar
    MelGX

    I heard this report the other day. I came away thinking that identifying herself as an only child must help Cindy justify the fact that she was the sole heir to her father’s fortune. He left his other daughter zip. Like father like daughter.

  9. Jen B. Avatar
    Jen B.

    My Mom has found it easier to describe herself as a only child rather than explain all her half-brother and sisters from her parents after-marriages.

  10. shelby Avatar
    shelby

    Eh, I hate to defend Cindy on anything, but in one sense I can understand her statement: my many shortcomings in the realm of interpersonal skills are frequently attributed to my being an “only child” even though I also have a half-sister from my father’s previous marriage. That isn’t to say my sister is not my sister, it’s just a sociological explanation for why I’m an asshole: I didn’t learn to share, didn’t learn how to lose at games, didn’t learn how to compromise etc., b/c my big sister lived with her mom.

    So, if Cindy is just trying to explain to us why she’s a spoiled brat, then I totally see where she’s coming from. But she should definitely refine the language to something more like “I was raised as an only child.”

    But yeah, nice family values McCain is representin’.

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