Truth Nor Consequences II

Last night, I spent some time on the Internet. After several weeks away from the fray, I waded onto YouTube and investigated some of the latest shenanigans by the GOP candidates. Shall we say I was a bit dumbfounded to discover that their lies have inflamed some of their so-called followers to the point where audience members have taken to calling out explicit threats against the opposition candidates. Okay, we all know that a fair amount of the Republican base is racist. And, thank God, we live in a country that permits freedom of speech . . . even hate speech! But the brazenness of some of these catcalls is enough to chill the blood of even the staunchest defender of the Bill of Rights. So outrageous has certain of this audience response become that McCain himself has tried to quell it.

Not so, of course, his running mate. For someone who took such umbrage at the Democratic candidate's reference to "pigs with lipstick," you'd think Sarah Palin might be offended that MSNBC captions her appearances with the phrase "Pitbully Pulpit." But not our “hockey mom.” Nosirree! For her part, she seems to revel in rabble-rousing! And, if the rabble were a little less easy to rouse or anything that came from her mouth a teensy bit more true, one might even say she's good at it. I guess the campaign had to find something she could do since she certainly can't answer questions. At the same time, I relish the irony that John McCain spoke forthrightly earlier in his run for the presidency about the public's distaste for negative campaigning. In contrast, I'm not sure Obama has ever felt the need to do likewise. While his team doesn't hesitate to cite negative facts about the opposition, they haven't really "gone negative" in the same way as McCain-Palin, have they?

Am I surprised that the Republicans have turned to negative campaigning as their numbers slide? Of course not. Karl Rove may not officially be advising McCain, but that doesn't mean he's ever out of the picture when it comes to contemporary Republican politics. I don't know about you, but I wonder how much money he's making these days as political commentator for that bastion of muckraking journalism Fox News. And did anyone besides me see the clip where even good old Karl had to admit that McCain's speech on the night of Obama's nomination might have been ill-advised? Too bad it isn't otherwise, but the Party who gave this country Abraham Lincoln has declined today to the point where any sort of campaign ethics seems to elude them. And, in recent years, they have Karl Rove to thank for that.

But now, I'm going to tell you about the most surprising of the lies I learned last night. On YouTube, there are clips from a program called The Young Turks. As I lurched around in the quagmire of political coverage clipped at YouTube, I came across these guys' commentary on the McCains' lie concerning their adopted daughter, which story broke in the Christian Science Monitor of August 20, 2008. As the commentary on the story reveals, this particular untruth is extraordinarily egregious and, for that matter, completely superfluous.

Apparently, prior to John McCain's run for the presidency, the story he and his wife Cindy regularly told concerning their adoption of a Bangladeshi orphan girl was completely true. In 1991 while Cindy was in Bangladesh on a medical mission, she visited a Dhaka orphanage that had been founded by Mother Teresa. Perhaps the nuns there knew that one of Mrs. McCain's charitable interests worked with birth defects in children, but whether or not, they urged her to help two girls who needed surgeries that they couldn't obtain locally. McCain agreed to take the children to the U.S. and see to it that they received the care they needed.

During the plane trip home Mrs. McCain was moved by the plight of the 10-week old baby, who had a fairly severe cleft palate, among other problems. In fact, as she tells it, this girl so touched her heart that Mrs. McCain decided she and her husband would adopt the little one. When John met Cindy on the ground in Arizona, seeing she had babies in tow, he inquired what she planned to do with the little girls. Cindy responded that she thought the girl who is now called Bridget could come home with them. Eventually, the McCains formally adopted Bridget while friends of theirs became parents to the other little girl, Mickey, who had a congenital heart problem. Like many good adoptive parents, the McCains made little noise about the noble act of rescuing these children. In fact, the less fuss everyone made over Bridget's specialness, the more easily she could truly grow into being their daughter and feel like she really belonged with her newfound family.

But the McCains' good deed would not go unpunished. During the lead up to the 2000 presidential election when John McCain opposed George W. Bush for the Republican nomination, Karl Rove and Charlie Condon hatched the brilliant idea of a phone campaign in South Carolina where Bush was trailing after McCain's win in New Hampshire. This phony survey called registered voters and posed the question: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" Not a lie . . . exactly! (And, of course, Bill Clinton "never had sex with that woman" either.) Surely, this is just the sort of question any pollster might ask. . . . Or, maybe not! Can anyone say "underhanded," or how about just plain "dirty politics?" But the ploy worked. There's a good deal of evidence that the whisper campaign set in motion by these fraudulent calls almost singlehandedly put the kibosh on McCain's chances for the presidency at the time. Thus, we wound up with the eight interminable years of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove and the guy who pastes his hair down with his own spit. [Aw, c'mon, his name starts with a "W". . . . Wolfowitz. I finally remembered it.]

Lest anyone suggest that John McCain cannot learn from past "mistakes," this is where the story begins to get really loopy. Shortly after losing the 2000 primary race, McCain told interviewer Morgan Strong that he believes "there is a special place in hell for people like those" who used his daughter Bridget in such a reckless and shameful way. I agree. But, if that's the case, why would you hire one of them to help you obtain your heart's ambition? Yet that's what John McCain did. In August 2006, he chose Charlie Condon to head up the revitalization of his political action committee, Straight Talk America. Since that effort ceased when McCain clinched his party's nomination, one assumes Condon has played other roles on staff. By association at least, Dan Glaister has Condon lurking somewhere behind the scenes in various decisions since mid-September of this year, when McCain's campaign called a halt to all informal moments between the candidate and the press and, then, foisted his lipstick-wearing running mate on him.

No matter from what circles of hell McCain now chooses the people closest to him, I've got to wonder who decided to spin the story of his daughter's adoption with a certain completely uncalled-for twist. On 3 February 2008, both The Sunday Mail [Sorry! I've been unable to track that reference and probably ought to delete it therefore, but we can trust the Huffington Post, can't we?] and The Sunday Telegraph ran stories about Cindy McCain that explicitly state it was Mother Teresa herself who convinced McCain to bring the children to the U.S. The first of these publications even puts the suspect sentence in Mrs. McCain's own words: "As only Mother Teresa can, she prevailed upon me to take this baby and another baby to the United States for medical care." That same day, someone changed the McCain campaign website's bio of Mrs. McCain to include the similar statement: "On one of those missions, Mother Teresa convinced Cindy to take two babies in need of medical attention to the United States."

Of course, it turns out that Mother Teresa was not even on the continent of Asia at the time, let alone at work in the Bangladeshi orphanage. Seems like someone should have taken a half-hour or so to do a little fact-checking. Yet, when you lie so blithely and get away with it so often, why let a little fact like Mother Teresa's actual whereabouts get in the way. For the most part, I refer you again to The Young Turks' fairly thorough analysis of this lie and the absolute lack of any necessity for it. Yet, in service to the second part of my title for this piece—"consequences"—I must pick up one of their points concerning it. What sort of media feeding frenzy would such a lie have provoked if it had come from Michelle Obama's mouth? Somehow, I doubt the Christian Science Monitor would have been the only major publication to carry the story. (The truth about the McCains has not been overlooked by the blogosphere, of course, since the story broke a couple months ago. But sometime you just have to wonder where the mainstream media keeps their heads.)
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