John and Cindy McCain - Never Let the Truth Get in Your Way

A disturbing pattern seems to be emerging with BOTH John and Cindy McCain. Much like the Chimperator, they simply change the true facts to fit their needs or make a story sound better or more dramatic. The untruths range from John McCain's disingenuousness about his affair with Cindy BEFORE he was divorced from his first wife, to Cindy's convenient erasure of the existence of her half sisters, to claiming to having met with Mother Teresa when no such meeting occurred.

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After eight years of an almost pathologically dishonest president, does the country need more of this dishonesty? In my view, the answer is a resounding NO!! Increasingly, a McCain presidency looks more and more to be a poorly retreaded Bush third term. My comments on McCain's divorce can be found here and here. With respect to Cindy McCain's disappearing half sisters, here are some highlights from the Washington Post:

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When Cindy McCain talks about growing up, she usually refers to herself as an "only child" -- a phrase that ignores the existence of her half sisters. "It's terribly painful," Kathleen Hensley Portalski said yesterday. "It is as if she is the 'real' daughter. I am also a real daughter."

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Portalski and McCain are both children of the late Jim Hensley, the Arizona businessman who founded one of the largest beer distributorships in the nation. Kathleen, 65, is the product of Hensley's first marriage in the 1930s to Mary Jeanne Parks. Hensley divorced Parks for Marguerite "Smitty" Johnson, whom he met at a West Virginia hospital in World War II and married in 1945. Cindy was born nine years later.

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The half sisters had little contact growing up and have not spoken since Hensley's funeral in 2000. In his will, he left just $10,000 to his older daughter; Cindy inherited her father's multimillion-dollar fortune.

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Portalski told our colleague Kimberly Kindy that she stood quietly by for decades while her father lavished attention on his second family. But the past few months -- with Cindy McCain's glowing childhood memories and repeated references to being her father's only child -- finally became too much. "I was his family, too," she said from her home in Phoenix. "I saw him at Christmas and I spent my birthdays with him."

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But there's more: Cindy McCain has another half sister. Before her marriage to Hensley, Johnson had a daughter, Dixie Burd, by a previous relationship. Burd, who is much older than Cindy, could not be reached for comment.

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One would think that having walked off with nearly her father's entire fortune, the disingenuous Cindy McCain could at least acknowledge her half sisters' existence. Sadly, that's more than Cindy is apparently willing to do. Erasing her half sister's existence isn't Cindy's only problem with telling the truth. Apparently to gain brownie points she's furthering a myth about a meeting she had with Mother Teresa in connection with her adoption of an orphan. As Andrew Sullivan discusses, the only problem is that the meeting never occurred. Here are highlights from Andrew's blog:

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Part of the McCain Celebrity, as packaged for the evangelical base, is the rescue of two Bangladeshi girls at the behest of Mother Theresa, one of whom, Bridget, they subsequently adopted. During my live-blogging of Saddleback, I described the McCain adoption story as "peerless." And it is indeed an admirable, selfless thing - and a completely legitimate aspect of a candidate's life to be part of his campaign message. The story of how Mother Teresa talked them into it makes it all the more poignant. The only trouble is: it's not true:

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But a source who was with McCain on that 1991 trip, and who asked that his name not be used because of prior legal dealings with the McCain family, says that Mother Teresa was not at the orphanage when Cindy decided to bring the two girls home.

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I note that this false story was on the McCain website and has since been corrected. Now, the question is whether and when Cindy McCain met with Mother Teresa: A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where. The campaign has since reworded the reference to the adoption on its website.

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Can we nail down the date of that meeting? Or are these questions no one should dare ask of a POW war hero?

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

This story from Yahoo News about a new book being released about Mother Teresa (http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20070823/wl_time/motherteresascrisisoffaith) shows that this noble woman had many spiritual doubts. I believe that if one is a thinking, rational, and perceptive person, one cannot help but have spiritual doubts from time to time or even for extended periods of time. Faith involves doubt and coming to terms with it as opposed to blind acceptance. If anything, I have respect for Mother Teresa who at least could voice her doubt as opposed to disingenuous blowhards like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson, to name a few, who act as if they have all the answers and have a direct line to God. Here are some highlights from the article:

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one - the naked one - the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere - "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, - Listen and do not hear - the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me - that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction - that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever - or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."