Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time..
Sen. John McCain’s campaign reacted with fury early this morning to a New York Times profile of the senator’s wife Cindy. A campaign spokesman called the article a "vicious attack" and released a copy of a letter the campaign’s lawyer sent to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller.
In the letter, sent before the article was published, McCain lawyer John Dowd described the reporting effort as an example of the "cruel hit pieces designed to injure people that only the worst rag would investigate and publish. I know you and your colleagues are always preaching about raising the level of civil discourse in our political campaigns," Dowd wrote. "I think taking some your own medicine is in order here"…
"From the start, Mrs. McCain’s marriage has been defined by her husband’s ambitions, and despite her sometimes punishing ride in political life, she does whatever she must to help fulfill them. As his poll numbers have slid recently, her devotion has seemed only to grow.""Mrs. McCain, 54, describes herself as her husband’s best friend, though for the last two decades they have mostly lived apart, she in Arizona, he in Washington. She initially seemed like an ideal political partner, giving Mr. McCain a home state, money and contacts that jump-started his career. But as the years passed, she also became a liability at times. She played a role in the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal, and just as her husband was rehabilitating his reputation, she was caught stealing drugs from her nonprofit organization to feed her addiction to painkillers. She has a fortune that sets the McCains apart from most other Americans, a problem in a presidential race that hinges on economic anxieties…"
"In 1994, Mrs. McCain dissolved the charity after admitting that she had been addicted to painkillers for years and had stolen prescription drugs from it. She had used the drugs, first given for back pain, to numb herself during the Keating Five investigation, she confessed to Newsweek magazine. ‘The newspaper articles didn’t hurt as much, and I didn’t hurt as much,’ she wrote in an essay. ‘The pills made me feel euphoric and free.’ The scandal broke just as her husband had been trying to rehabilitate his reputation. He had no idea his wife had been an addict, he told the press."
— “Fact is, it’s hard to find any researched articles about his life that don’t make him look insensitive at best, and at worst, downright selfish and misguided.”
Hey now – in case you haven’t heard – he was a POW in Viet Nam after crashing another plane. You can’t just make that kind of hero stuff up.