The media is going ga-ga over Sarah Palin, and crediting her with giving the GOP that "populist" hockey mom touch they've yearned for all these years.
And yet, the night before Palin rocked the base, Cindy McCain rocked the ... rocks. From Vanity Fair:
One of the persistent memes in the Republican line of attack against Barack Obama is the notion that he is an elitist, whereas the G.O.P. represent real working Americans like Levi “F-in’ Redneck” Johnston.
It caught our attention, then, when First Lady Laura Bush and would-be First Lady Cindy McCain took the stage Tuesday night wearing some rather fancy designer clothes. So we asked our fashion department to price out their outfits.
Laura Bush Oscar de la Renta suit: $2,500 Stuart Weitzman heels: $325 Pearl stud earrings: $600–$1,500 Total: Between $3,425 and $4,325
Cindy McCain Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000 Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500 Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000 Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000–$25,000 Shoes, designer unknown: $600 Total: Between $299,100 and $313,100
Poor Laura Bush -- her outfit was downright cheap by comparison to 7-houses Cindy... Ah, the little people!
Can you go to hell for lying about Mother Theresa?
I may have to consult some Catholic friends on this, since I haven't been Catholic since I was like, six. At the Huffpo, Mark Nickolas explores the "evolving" story about just who promoted Cindy to bring home those two Bangladeshi orphans, a story McCain exploited so well with the, I think deliberate, help of Pastor Rick Warren last week.
The John McCain campaign chose to go bat crap crazy after the Obama campaign capitalized on El Richbo's colossal gaffe, telling a Politico reporter that he'd have to have his staff get back to him regarding how many homes McCain owns. Now, they're threatening to put "everything" on the table, from Rezko to Rev. Wright, a sure sign in politics that they fear the line of attack that McCain is the elitist in the race will work.
Tonight on the final "Verdict" (and I'm sorry the show is going, btw...) Republican talking point peddler (he's actually a nice guy, but geez... enough with the hackery, man...) Rev. Joe Watkins floated the trial balloon that not only is Rezko "on the table," Obama is "attacking John McCain's wife," because in fact it's Cindy who owns the 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 homes they've got.
Really? Do you really want to go there? Because if you do, I've got questions:
If John McCain left his first wife for Cindy, when did they start dating? While he was still good and married to wife #1. (Somebody call Rick Warren... and the National Enquirer!)
If John McCain doesn't own the homes, why is that? Because Cindy is a $100 million heiress who was damned sure not gonna marry a social climbing pol without an ironclad prenup.
If John McCain is a social climbing pol with a super rich wife, a pre-nup, and access to so many homes he can't remember them, what else is he forgetting? That Cindy also brought to the marriage a fortuitous introduction to a Mr. Keating.
And by the way, if John McCain wants to go Rezko, let's take his Rezko and raise him a Diamond. Per Crooks and Liars back in April:
When considering John McCain’s history of unethical behavior, the list usually starts (and ends) with the Keating Five scandal in the 1980s, for which McCain was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for having shown, at a minimum, poor judgment. In the aftermath, McCain helped improve his public image, and bury the scandal, by becoming an advocate of campaign-finance reform.
But the notion that McCain cleaned up his act may not be entirely true. Take, for example, Donald Diamond, a wealthy Arizona real estate developer and generous McCain contributor, who wanted some coastal land in California freed up by an Army base closing.
When Mr. Diamond wanted to buy land at the base, Fort Ord, Mr. McCain assigned an aide who set up a meeting at the Pentagon and later stepped in again to help speed up the sale, according to people involved and a deposition Mr. Diamond gave for a related lawsuit. When he appealed to a nearby city for the right to develop other property at the former base, Mr. Diamond submitted Mr. McCain’s endorsement as “a close personal friend.”
Writing to officials in the city, Seaside, Calif., the senator said, “You will find him as honorable and committed as I have.”
Courting local officials and potential partners, Mr. Diamond’s team promised that he could “help get through some of the red tape in dealing with the Department of the Army” because Mr. Diamond “has been very active with Senator McCain,” a partner said in a deposition.
For Mr. McCain, the Arizona Republican who has staked two presidential campaigns on pledges to avoid even the appearance of dispensing an official favor for a donor, Mr. Diamond is the kind of friend who can pose a test.
Ya think? The closer one looks at this, the worse it appears.
In California, the McCain aide’s assistance with the Army helped Mr. Diamond complete a purchase in 1999 that he soon turned over for a $20 million profit. And Mr. McCain’s letter of recommendation reinforced Mr. Diamond’s selling point about his McCain connections as he pursued — and won in 2005 — a potentially much more lucrative deal to develop a resort hotel and luxury housing.
In Arizona, Mr. McCain has helped Mr. Diamond with matters as small as forwarding a complaint in a regulatory skirmish over the endangered pygmy owl, and as large as introducing legislation remapping public lands. In 1991 and 1994, Mr. McCain sponsored two laws sought by Mr. Diamond that resulted in providing him millions of dollars and thousands of acres in exchange for adding some of his properties to national parks. The Arizona senator co-sponsored a third similar bill now before the Senate. […]
For the California projects, the campaign said the McCain aide arranged the introduction to an Army official for Mr. Diamond’s team as “a constituent matter.”
Other things that are now "on the table":
John McCain's use of former mistress/current wife Cindy's corporate jets for his campaign...
John McCain's rejection of an MLK holiday (you want to play Rev. Wright clips? Take two doses of that next week during the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington. Hey, John, maybe you can consult your personal wise man John Lewis for advice on a response...
You know what, bat-crap crazy McCain communication staffers? Turns out it really is fun putting things on the table. Thanks!
Oh, and welcome to the come-uppance, Diamond John. And yes, yes, I know you're a former POW, okay?
Did you know that Cindy McCain has a half-sister she doesn't acknowledge, and that the Hensley tradition of acquiring a newfangled wife when the old one gets boring goes back at least a generation? NPR has the story.
She named her charity the American Voluntary Medical Team. In 1991, she camped in the Kuwait desert five days after the end of the gulf war to take medical supplies to refugees. That same year, she visited Mother Teresa's orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she saw 160 newborn girls who had been abandoned. The nuns handed her a small baby with a cleft palate so severe that the infant couldn't be fed. Another baby, also just a few weeks old, had a heart defect. Worried they would die without medical attention, Cindy applied for visas to take the girls back to the United States. But the country's minister of Health refused to sign the papers. "We can do surgery on this child," an official told her. Frustrated, Cindy slammed her fist on the table. "Then do it! What are you waiting for?" The official, stunned, simply signed the papers. "I don't know where I got the nerve," Cindy told Harper's Bazaar.
I guess her wrists were in better shape then ... continuing:
When she arrived in Phoenix, she carried the baby with the cleft palate off the plane. Her husband met her at the airport. He looked at the baby. "Where is she going?" he asked her. "To our house," she replied. They adopted the little girl and named her Bridget. Family friends adopted the other little girl. ...
... As she nursed baby Bridget back to health, Cindy was suffering problems of her own. In 1989, she lifted young Jimmy and ruptured a disc in her back, an injury that took several surgeries to fix. As she recovered in the hospital, an orderly set a newspaper down on her bed. "Guess your husband's not so great after all," she said sarcastically. On the front page was a story questioning whether McCain and four other members of Congress had inappropriately intervened to save a failed savings and loan owned by developer Charles Keating—a Hensley family friend. Cindy and her father had invested nearly $400,000 in a strip mall Keating owned. He had been a major contributor to McCain's campaigns and John and Cindy had vacationed at Keating's home in the Bahamas nearly 10 times, often flying down on one of Keating's private jets. McCain insisted he had paid for the use of the jet, but Cindy, in charge of the family's records, couldn't find the receipts. Ultimately, McCain received a mild rebuke for "poor judgment." But Cindy, convinced she had embarrassed her husband, was distraught. Under stress and still in pain after surgery, she began taking more of the pain pills doctors had prescribed. Soon she was addicted, taking up to 20 Percocets and Vicodins a day.
Initially, her doctors simply refilled her prescriptions. But as her appetite for pills increased, she began stealing drugs from her own nonprofit, asking doctors who worked for the group to obtain the pills for her trips overseas. She worked hard to conceal her habit. If anyone saw her downing a pill, she said it was a vitamin. Her husband, away in Washington most of the time, suspected nothing.
Her mother was the first to notice something was wrong. Cindy looked terrible and had lost weight. "What's the matter with you?" she asked Cindy one night in 1992. Cindy confessed, and says she quit the pills cold turkey that day. But she didn't tell John. "I was scared," she told NEWSWEEK. "I didn't want to disappoint him." The secret didn't keep. A little more than a year later, an employee who had been fired from Cindy's nonprofit went to the Drug Enforcement Administration and reported that pills had gone missing. When the DEA called Cindy to ask questions, she broke down and confessed. But first, she called McCain from her lawyer's office to tell him the news. The senator rushed home. "I should have known that it was happening," he told NBC News later. "Maybe I was wrapped up too much in Washington and my ambitions to pay as much attention as I should have." Cindy paid restitution, did community service and attended counseling sessions.
I hadn't known that Cindy essentially set up the Keating affair by introducing her hubby to her rich friend. And her reactions to so many things seem to suggest ... I hate to say it ... a kind of fear of her husband that to me is just plain odd. In fact, a lot about this couple is weird. About the only thing that's clear is that in her, John saw a woman better looking than his broken, former swimsuit model wife, and much, much richer and more influential; someone who could help him fulfill his ambitions. And she has gone dutifully along -- though she did do one smart thing: Cindy got herself a pre-nup.
And as for her admissions on the drug addition, as usual, the back story is a little more complicated than the glowing media profiles:
I believe she wore red that day. She granted semi-exclusive interviews to one TV station and three daily newspaper reporters in Arizona, tearfully recalling her addiction, which came about after painful back and knee problems and was exacerbated by the stress of the Keating Five banking scandal that had ensnared her husband. To make matters worse, McCain admitted, she had stolen the drugs from the American Voluntary Medical Team, her own charity, and had been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The local press cooed over her hard-luck story. One of the four journalists spoon-fed the story -- Doug McEachern, then a reporter for Tribune Newspapers, now a columnist with the Arizona Republic (and, it must be added, normally much more acerbic) -- wrote this rather typical lead:
"She was blonde and beautiful. A rich man's daughter who became a politically powerful man's wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly."
What McEachern and the others didn't know was that, far from being a simple, honest admission designed to clear her conscience and help other addicts, Cindy McCain's storytelling had been orchestrated by Jay Smith, then John McCain's Washington campaign media advisor. And it was intended to divert attention from a different story, a story that was getting quite messy.
I know, because I had been working on that story for months at Phoenix New Times. I had finally tracked down the public records that confirmed Cindy McCain's addiction and much more, and the McCains knew I was about to get them. Cindy's tale was released on the day the records were made public.
But the story I was pursuing was not so much about Cindy McCain's unfortunate addiction. It was much more about her efforts to keep that story from coming to light, and the possible manipulation of the criminal justice system by her husband and his cohorts. The irony is that Cindy's secret would have stayed secret if John McCain's heavy-hitting lawyer, John Dowd (of D.C.'s Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; his most recent claim to fame was serving as co-counsel for fellow partner Vernon Jordan during impeachment) hadn't heavy-handedly pulled out all the stops to protect the McCain family.
Dowd tried to get back at the man on Cindy McCain's staff, Tom Gosinski, who had blown the whistle on her drug pilfering to the DEA. But in the course of trying to get local law enforcement officials to investigate Gosinski -- Dowd and the McCains considered him an extortionist; others might call him a whistleblower -- Dowd set in motion a process that would eventually bring the whole sordid story to light. When that maneuver backfired, the McCain media machine went into overdrive to spin the story.
The reporter, Amy Silverman, wrote more about Gosinski
In the early 1990s, Tom Gosinski was the director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, which did relief and medical volunteer work in third world countries.
Hired by Cindy McCain in 1991, Gosinski enjoyed his job, but he began to notice McCain's erratic behavior in the summer of 1992. In his journal, he wrote that he and others suspected the boss was addicted to painkillers and might have been stealing them from the organization.
In January 1993, McCain fired Gosinski. She told him that AVMT was having financial problems and couldn't afford him.
Gosinski had already come to suspect that Cindy McCain had gotten volunteer doctors with AVMT to sign prescriptions for her, and had used employees' names to fill them. Worried his own name had been used (he would eventually learn that it had), Gosinski approached DEA agents in the spring of 1993 to report McCain's suspicious behavior. The DEA launched an investigation.
Almost a year later, with the statute of limitations about to run out, Gosinski hired a labor attorney and sued Cindy McCain for wrongful termination. He intended to claim that she fired him because she suspected he knew about her addiction, but the lawsuit never got that far. Instead, Gosinski's attorney wrote to the McCains, asking for a settlement of $250,000.
And then...
Rumors about the untold details of the lawsuit hit the cocktail-party circuit that spring, but the story was locked up tight. As a federal criminal investigation, the DEA probe was completely secret; none of it was public record.
The entire story would likely have gone unreported if attorney John Dowd hadn't entered the picture. He wrote to Maricopa County attorney Richard Romley, a political ally of McCain, and asked him to investigate Gosinski for extortion.
"We believe that Mr. Gosinski is aware that in the past Cindy had an addiction to prescription painkillers ... Given Cindy's public position, exposure of this sensitive matter would harm her reputation, career, the operation of AVMT, and subject her to contempt and ridicule," Dowd wrote on April 28, 1994.
Thus began the inadvertent outing of Cindy McCain. Although the federal investigative materials were not public, the county investigative materials were. Romley launched an investigation, and one of the first things his people did, naturally, was ask the feds to turn over their investigative materials.
New Times finally got hold of the county investigative materials and we did our own story. So did the Arizona Republic, which was uncharacteristically aggressive, perhaps because the McCain machine had left the paper out of the loop on the story of Cindy's addiction.
Among the questions asked: Did Cindy McCain get preferential treatment by the feds? True, Cindy was a first-time offender, which partially explains the fact that she did no prison time; instead, she entered a diversion program. But at the time, defense lawyers told New Times that if Cindy McCain had been a poor minority and not married to a U.S. senator, she likely would have been locked up.
The progressive Christian group has made a modest $20,000 buy in tomorrow night's Rick Warren forum at Saddleback Church, in which candidates Obama and McCain will be asked about their personal lives.
The ad emphasizes Obama's family ties and loyalty to his wife, back-handedly referring to McCain's failure to keep his vows to his first wife, whom he left for Cindy... it's a point one man in the ad, Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell (who famously officiated at Jenna Bush's wedding) emphasized when he blasted McCain for suggesting his strangely fragile wife Cindy ... (when exactly did you stop beating her again, John...???) try out for Miss Buffalo Chip... (at least he didn't try to shake her hand ... again...)
Oh ... my ... god ... I feel SO sorry for John McCain's advance team. First, they have to find a venue where there are already going to be a lot of people (because a lot of people won't show up just to see John McCain.) Then, they have to get John and his wife onstage before the booing and the boredom start. Then, they have to make sure John has his talking points at least partially memorized, so he doesn't have to read EVERYTHING from those little note cards. And then ... they have to stand there and watch him sound like a very, very, very, very old man. Watch ... and roll...
Okay, that was the one with the hilarious soundtrack added, but come on, you laughed till you cried. Admit it... (You can find the version without the soundtrack here. The sad thing is, it's almost damned near as funny!)
Now, let's check out a news report from Sturgis, where 50,000 ... er ... "3 or 4,000 people" gathered to hear a concert ... um, and then they got John McCain:
Next, you have to prevent him from saying anything that could loosely be translated as: "take my wife, please!"
Cindy McCain forced by creepy husband to participate in topless biker chic contest so he can appear to be non-creepy "regular guy" ... shudder...
Meanwhile, the LA Times runs down John McCain's quest for (gasp) a little celebrity, among the bikers.
The jocks of the glossy magazine world have spoofed the nerds. Conde Nast's Vanity Fair has posted a mock cover showing Sen. John McCain dapping his wife Cindy, who cradles a armful of prescription drug bottles. A portrait of George W. Bush hands in the background of their fictional "house." McCain is shown resting on a walker.
BTW, Ambinder also points out that the VF jocks apparently ripped off the New York Daily News. Compare for yourself:
Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, is set to get a huge payout from the sale of Anheuser-Busch Cos., brewer of Budweiser and hundreds of other brands, to Belgian beverage giant InBev NV.
McCain, the heiress to the third-largest Anheuser distributor, owns at a minimum $1 million in the American company, according to John McCain’s Senate financial disclosure forms, which don’t offer any more information for large assets held by his spouse. Under the deal, she and other stockholders will get a cash payout for the stock, which is owned through her company, Hensley and Co.
According to the update, Cindy's holdings are even fluffier:
UPDATE: Mrs. McCain’s company owns between $2.5 million to $5 million in Anheuser stock, meaning it will earn $800,000 to $1.6 million premium on the pre-deal stock price. Although Senate personal financial disclosure forms only say that Mrs. McCain’s firm owns at least $1 million, a Democratic Party aide points out that it also reports $50,000-$100,000 in dividends in 2007. With $1.25 dividend per share last year, that means the McCains own between 40,000 and 80,000 shares.
Drink up, Cindy! And remember to pay your taxes (this time)...
... Cashing out could leave the McCains with hefty capital gains, which would be taxed at a rate of 15% under the Bush tax cuts that John McCain opposed and now supports. (Barack Obama has proposed raising the capital gains tax.)
Hensley and Co., founded by Cindy McCain’s father, has an exclusive distribution deal for Budweiser and other products in the Phoenix area. The merger is unlikely to affect that arrangement, and the company already sells InBev brands, including Stella Artois and Beck’s, through an existing agreement with Anheuser.
They're just your average American family. No country clubs, good looking dates and cigarettes here, folks! In fact, John and Cindy McCain are just ... like ... us.
Item one: There's never a recession at Cindy's house!
No, my friends, there's only shoes, shoes, SHOES! Cindy shops til she drops, and in that devil-may-care that only a beer heiress can muster, she kicks up her heels while the little people scrounge for gas money (and bake nasty, "homemade" cookies):
Cindy McCain and the McCain children are the beneficiaries of a beer distributing fortune amassed by her parents and estimated to be worth $100 million or more. Though the McCains maintain separate finances, Cindy McCain’s family fortune has boosted her husband’s political career at critical junctures, helping to fund his inaugural 1982 run for Congress and helping to subsidize his current presidential campaign when it all but went broke last year. ...
... While Cindy McCain, her dependent children and the trusts and companies they control made as much as $29 million — and likely substantially more — from her family’s business interests from 2004 through last year, data from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the Center for Responsive Politics also reveals that they spent $11 million purchasing five condominiums for the family, hired additional household help and racked up progressively larger credit card bills almost every year.
Their credit card bills peaked between January 2007 and May 2008, during which time Cindy McCain charged as much as $500,000 in a single month on one American Express card and $250,000 on another, while one of their two dependent children had an AmEx card with a monthly balance as large as $50,000.
A campaign aide who did not want to be identified discussing the McCains’ personal finances stressed that the credit card balances are “not ongoing debt.”
And how! (John, what's the price of a gallon of gasoline again? Oh, that's right. Only the little people pay to pump! To Barneys, Jeevsey, and put some English on it!)
But Cochran said he observed McCain engage in a physical confrontation with a Sandinista while participating in a diplomatic mission led by Sen. Bob Dole and others in the fall of 1987. Cochran, McCain — who had won election to the Senate the year before after serving in the House — and other members of a bipartisan committee of lawmakers called the Central American Negotiations Observer Group met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, head of the left wing political party known as "Sandinistas," about tensions in the region.
The atmosphere was tense, as the U.S. was pressing the countries involved "pretty hard." Cochran noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel.
"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, 'Good grief, everybody around here has got guns,' and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."
There were no punches thrown and the two sat back down. The man, who appeared to be ruffled after the confrontation with McCain, was an associate of Ortega's, possibly a lieutenant, but Cochran said he was unsure of his identity.
Right to bear arms, Thad ... right to bear frikkin' arms...
By the way, the next time a scrawny little runt reporter dares to ask about John's service in Vietnam, and why it by itself qualifies him to be president? Someone's going to get hurt. You got that, ABC's David Wright?
McCain became visibly angry when I asked him to explain how his Vietnam experience prepared him for the Presidency.
"Please," he said, recoiling back in his seat in distaste at the very question.
McCain allies Sen. Lindsey Graham stepped in to rescue him. Graham expressed admiration for McCain’s stance on the treatment of detainees in US custody.
"That to me is a classic example of how his military experience helped him shape public policy in a way no other senator could have done,’’ Graham said.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, also traveling on the trip, expressed admiration for McCain’s wartime service as well.
McCain then collected himself and apologized for his initial reaction.
"I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences," he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the "heroes" who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.
"I am always reluctant to talk about these things," McCain said.
Good thing John's appointment secretary, Lindsey, was there to help. Boy, that gal sure helps a fella keep a level head!
Well folks, that's all for now! The McCain's sure do appreciate your dropping by! Oh, and wipe your feet on the way out. Poor people are sooooo, grimey!
It's customary in pundit circles to state that Michelle Obama is a potentially problematic spouse in need of a media makeover. But consider Cindy McCain's circus tent full of mishaps, from pilfered cookie recipes (why not just admit that you're rich, so you don't bake?) to ... four years of unpaid back taxes???
NEWSWEEK - When you're poor, it can be hard to pay the bills. When you're rich, it's hard to keep track of all the bills that need paying. It's a lesson Cindy McCain learned the hard way when NEWSWEEK raised questions about an overdue property-tax bill on a La Jolla, Calif., property owned by a trust that she oversees. Mrs. McCain is a beer heiress with an estimated $100 million fortune and, along with her husband, she owns at least seven properties, including condos in California and Arizona.
San Diego County officials, it turns out, have been sending out tax notices on the La Jolla property, an oceanfront condo, for four years without receiving a response. County records show the bills, which were mailed to a Phoenix address associated with Mrs. McCain's trust, were returned by the post office. According to a McCain campaign aide, who requested anonymity when discussing a private matter, an elderly aunt of Mrs. McCain's lives in the condo, and the bank that manages the trust has not been receiving tax bills on the property. Shortly after NEWSWEEK inquired about the matter, the McCain aide e-mailed a receipt dated Friday, June 27, confirming payment by the trust to San Diego County in the amount of $6,744.42. County officials say the trust still owes an additional $1,742 for this year, an amount that is overdue and will go into default July 1. Told of the outstanding $1,742, the aide said: "The trust has paid all bills shown owing as of today and will pay all other bills due."
