It takes the UK’s Daily Mail to report on the presidential campaign story the US media refuses to cover:
McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.
But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.
And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.
She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier … In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.
Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.
And so McCain did what any honorable, loving, family man would do: he immediately started cheating on his faithful wife before eventually dumping her to marry a beautiful heiress 18 years his junior.
For her part, Carol McCain sounds philosophical:
“My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens…it just does.”
But former friends and acquaintances are not so forgiving….
They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.
Of course this is America, where everyone has the right to pursue happiness, and if McCain couldn’t be happy married to a woman who wasn’t tall, beautiful and wealthy, then perhaps it was best for him, Carol and their children to end the marriage. But really… enough of this family values character crap for a man who abandoned his crippled wife when she needed him most. One can assume the only reason he’s remained married to Cindy this long is that she’s managed to retain her height, looks, wealth and bladder.
In the words of Ross Perot (who paid Carol’s extensive medical bills while her husband was a prisoner of war):
“McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.
“After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.”
A history most Americans will never learn.
I always have liked Ross Perot.
A Leader we can believe in!
Now the right wing traitors, cowards and hypocrites will do ANYTHING to keep this sort of truth from being told. Their whole scheme depends on lies and deflection.
Truth be told, there’s no group of people with as much sexual, familial and moral misconduct as the GOP. No other party or group comes close.
Is this part of McInsane’s oft touted ‘experience’?
Yeah, Ross Perot is a crazy little man with a Napoleon complex, but his heart is in the right place.
I suppose getting drunk and driving into a canal full of water would have been just fine.
When it comes to throwing rocks,both parties reside in glass houses.
@6
Kennedy isn’t running for president.
@5
Exactly.
@6 so here is some typical direct evidence. A GOP asshole posing as a neutral observer brings up an event that happened to a dying man who is NOT running for office, in an an attempt to make it seem okay that leaving your disfigured wife is cool. How can these fucks live with themselves?
In the words of Ross Perot (who paid Carol’s extensive medical bills while her husband was a prisoner of war):
“McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.
“After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.”
Good words from Ross Perot concerning politicians in general: maybe that’s why I voted for him back in ’92.
All politicians are dicks with ears, concerned mostly with self-aggrandizement and power. McCain’s no different from the rest.
re 9: Well, he’s no different than other REPUBLICAN politicians. I would say that John Edwards’ response to his wife’s cancer is a far cry from the responses of Newt Gingrich and John McCain to their respective former wives’ travails. There’s no comparison. It’s only Republicans who are heartless psychopaths.
In my mind’s eye I can just see a younger McCain wildly gesticulating with his stubby T-Rex arms about the difficulty of getting ahead with a disfigured spouse.
@10 “McCain wildly gesticulating with his stubby T-Rex arms”
Hilarious.
Seriously, we need to know more about Cindy. If McCain is elected and continues to lose his mind, will she end up running the show like Nancy Reagan? Is Cindy into voodoo or something we should all know about?
I thought everyone knew this story? I have been aware of this for years. I know what kind of “man” McSame is. Perot has him pegged. The American public soon will too.
This man is a lot like Steve Garvey and Alex Rodriquez. A jealously maintained public persona that belies a private life that could not be more different or opposite. Garvey with all the kids and different women, A-Rod with the hookers and the posse. McSame with his lack of family values and legendary temper.
He is ill suited to be President.
Let me guess, he has a bumper sticker that says “Preserve the Sanctity of Marriage”
McCain isn’t “well suited” to be anything. I’m surprised that an angry little dwarf like him can be a Senator, but I guess that’s where Cindy comes in, isn’t it?
Okay, looking at this in the light most favorable to McCain, we can speculate that he came home from Vietnam, and felt cheated out of several of the most “fun loving” years of his life, and wanted to make up for it – even if it meant dumping his wife.
Of course, there’s no doubt that his wife was also cheated out of several “fun loving” years while she raised the kids while he was absent.
So even trying to be sympathetic to his viewpoint, I’m still left with the conclusion that McCain is a “self-oriented” person, one that doesn’t have much empathy for others and sees things only through the prism of how it affects him.
We’ve already had 7-1/2 years of experience with having one of those spoiled jerks in the White House. I doubt we could survive another four years of the same.
McCain and moral fiber should not be used in the same sentence. All of the Hillary supporters who are thinking of voting for McCain should read this story. In fact, any woman thinking of voting for McCain should read this – and should realize how easy it is for McCain to flip flop on issues like torture, campaign finance reform, telecom immunity, voodoo economics, tax cuts for the rich and on and on. Of course he can change his mind – he has no connection or loyalty to people or issues.
Dumping his disabled wife….for money and a younger more beautiful woman. That is the character that he displays with issues also.
@6 Well well, what have we here? A new troll? Or a cowardly old troll recycling himself with (yet another) new screen name?
I sure hope these idiots run against Ted Kennedy this fall. Or, better yet, a ticket of Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy.
Of course, some articles have speculated that McCain’s divorce & remarriage was simply a shrewd career strategy, getting him the money and political district he needed to get into politics. The fact that he was exchangin a disabled, no-longer attractive wife for a wealthy, healthy, and attractive one was merely a bonus.
“It seems that McCain, who had once revealed to fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam that he wanted to be president, was restless in 1979. As Navy liaison to the Senate, he didn’t have the career momentum he had counted on to propel him into an admiralty and on to the White House. He was 42, mired in stifling ordinariness. (Civilians call it “midlife crisis.”)
But McCain was making bold career moves on the home front, hotly pursuing a 25-year-old blond from a wealthy Arizona family — while married. Carol, his wife at the time, had once been quite a babe herself apparently, until a near-fatal car accident (while her husband was in Vietnam) left her 4 inches shorter, overweight and on crutches. The couple had three children, whom Carol cared for alone while her husband was in Vietnamese prisons.
McCain’s strategy worked perfectly: After chasing Cindy Hensley around the country for six months, he closed the deal late in the year, had a divorce by February and was married to Hensley shortly thereafter. Bingo! McCain was a candidate for Congress by early 1982, his coffers full, his home in the proper Arizona district purchased.”
Different War, Different Hero
Of course, if this had been Obama, you would hear the catcalls form Fox News 24/7, decrying his lack of “moral values” and saying that this conduct alone disqualifies him for the Presidency. Bunch of lying hypocrites.
And GOP trolls: Pointing out someone or a party’s HYPOCRACY is not Hypocrisy – so don’t bother with the JFK, Clinton “did it too” crap. The Democrats don’t try to shove the “family values” morals down your throats.
@19 thats because the dems have no morals.
So notice that the righties don’t want to talk about this AT FUCKING ALL! Can’t blame them since it completely destroys their typical family values horse shit!
“thats because the dems have no morals”
Yawn. Can the wingnuts come up with something new rather than this lazt tired rhetoric. And spare me the “Marxist” crap too.
@20 Some Republicans wear diapers when they’re with their whores. Some of them toe-tap in airport toilets. Others proposition big black cops in park toilets, offering money to blow the black guy. It looks like the odds are two in three that your superior Republican morality takes place in a public toilet. Which kind of moral Republican are you, PU?
Did McCain leave his wife right when he got home? I have no idea, but if so that is cruel! I know alot of military couples who have split immediately after the man comes home from duty, because they feel like they don’t know each other anymore and the “feelings” are gone, but to leave someone because they are disfigured?? WTF???
Now when will the absolutely spineless press ask John Insane McCain the question.
“John, how many women did you sleep with while still married to your first wife?”
There is not one single reporter with one billionth of the balls needed to ask the leader of the “family values” (sic) party this question.
The only group of individuals in America worse than the Republiconvict Party, is the press….. Goldy not included….
What ever happened to “It’s only sex?”
McCain isn’t a really great catch…neither is Barry.
We get to choose between twiddle dum and twiddle dee. Oh Yay!!