Cindy McCain lied
She didn’t forget. She didn’t misspeak. She didn’t embellish. She didn’t stretch the truth.
She lied:
The latest embellishments come from the McCain camp. Cindy McCain has repeatedly referred to herself as an “only child.” This week came news that she actually has two half sisters, although apparently she had very little contact with them.
The McCain campaign had also put out the story that Mother Teresa “convinced” Cindy to bring home two orphans from Bangladesh in 1991.
Mrs. McCain, it turns out, never met Mother Teresa on that trip. (Once contacted by the Monitor, the campaign revised the story on its website.)
Such exaggerations may simply be the product of a faulty memory or a desire to be “better” than one is in a political culture that requires larger-than-life idols. But with the advent of the fact-checking obsessed blogosphere – and a media racing to keep up – such self-aggrandizement doesn’t last as long as it once did.
“It’s all about myth-making,” says Darrell West, the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Politicians love to turn their stories into great epics, and sometimes they have to embellish to smooth out the story line.”
“But now there are too many professional and amateur fact-checkers,” he says. “And there are hundreds if not thousands of bloggers who have detailed knowledge on specialized information, so you really can’t get away with stretching the truth anymore.”
Can you imagine what would have happened in the media if Michelle had lied like Cindy lied?
crossposted at Rants from the Rookery
August 21st, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I heard about this on public radio. Also, their rich daddy left it all to Cindy, nothing to his first child.
August 23rd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Since the young man is unemployed and a Democrat, perhaps he could work for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If I was that family, I’d be hotfooting it to the tabloids to sell all the dirt possible on Cindy McCain. Obviously, she did something to influence her father’s will, or why would he not provide more for her two (half) sisters. For a woman who cares so much for the underpriviledged, it’s a shame Cindy McCain doesn’t care about her own family.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I think absolutely that Cindy cares more about her husband’s political career & getting good publicity for him (that’s why she’s involved with foreign countries) than her own family. How can she live with her conscience? With the millions of dollars she inherited, she could have been a lot more generous with her half-sisters. I don’t want a person in the White House with so few moral scruples.