Cindy McCain Where Are You When We Need You? By James M.Doumas

CINDY MCCAIN WHERE ARE YOU WHEN WE NEED YOU?

Like you I usually get between two and four e-mails a month forwarded to me by one of my conservative friends that contain the right wing talking points of the day. They usually have a jingoistic message or a racist innuendo disguised as a patriotic or moralistic message. It is unfortunate for the conservative e-mailers that I actually check out the facts in their messages.
An example is the e-mail gleefully forwarded to me last year regarding the conservatives favorite witch ( no John McCain I did not spell it wrong) Hillary Clinton. The message was that Mrs. Clinton was rude and disrespectiveful to gold star wives and mothers of American serviceman (please note that I do not call them troops) who died in Iraq. Reportedly, Senator Clinton was the only member of congress who refused to meet with them. The story gave no dates, time or other facts and did not mention any other names besides Senator Clinton. Not only did the lack of facts arouse my curiosity, but the story did not pass the logic test. Despite what one may think of Hillary Clinton, every intelligent person I have met regards her as a first rate politician. It did not make sense that she would go out of her way to insult such an obviously sympathetic group of people. So I did some research.
In communication with Senator Clinton’s staff I discovered that a group of gold star mothers and wives had shown up at the opening of a Clinton campaign office. The ladies did not have an appointment and no one knew they were coming. They had read about the office opening in the paper. When they arrived they discovered the office opening date had been reported incorrectly in the newspaper and no one was there except a volunteer who did not have clue as to what to do. The ladies left, but fortunately the volunteer got their names and contact information and passed it on. A Clinton staff member contacted them and arranged for a meeting with the Senator. Mrs. Clinton’s staff provided me with the names and contact information of the gold star mothers and wives. I checked with them and they all confirmed the story and had only nice things to say about Hillary Clinton and how they were received by her.
The second gem that I received was a classic example of how to string unconnected facts in a letter and let the reader do the connecting. This e-mail reported that Jay Leno, in an interview with Newsweek praised the USA and had only great things to say about George Bush and his
presidency. I managed to contact Jay Leno’s P.R. Man, no small feat, and was informed that while Mr. Leno has been interviewed by Newsweek and has expressed himself many times on the topic of American values he has never endorsed George Bush’s presidency.
Which brings us to Cindy McCain. Having exposed the lies of conservative blogers all these years I was surprised to learn that I was in complete agreement with their e-mail regarding Cindy McCain. They reported her as a beautiful, intelligent, level headed women. A person who not only keeps her family on the right track but has managed to run a multi-million dollar business at the same time. My response was wow! After doing some preliminary checking I am in agreement with their assessment of Mrs. McCain. My only question is why isn’t John McCain using her more and relying on her level headed advice?
Senator McCain should have relied on her advice several years ago when Charles Keating came to him and asked him to get the federal banking regulators off his back so he could continue his schemes to defraud the banks without interference. Cindy would have seen through his bogus arguments and have prevented Senator McCain from being embarrassed by a banking scandal that resulted in a loss to the U.S. taxpayer of over 500 billion dollars. I am certain that the level headed and hard noise business women would have told her husband not to support and vote for a federal bailout using taxpayer money to reimburse speculators like Neil Bush ( yes he is President Bush’s brother) for the millions of dollars they speculated in buying multi-million dollar CD that were going to pay over 20% in interest.
I can understand that since John McCain is in a predominately white-male party that he needs a female to front for him during the campaign. My question is why not Cindy? She is certainly better than his present choice Carly Fiorina. You remember Carly Fiorina? She is the whiz lady who was CEO of Hewlett Packer from 1999 to 2003. It was during this period that stockholder value was reduced by 40%, and Ms. Fiorina was dismissed by the board of directors for illegally wiretapping employee and board members phone conversations. Ms. Fiorina can not even remember her talking points correctly. Recently on a national televised talk show she twice mentioned the inequality in health plans covering viagra but not birth control. It was obvious that Ms. Fiorina was ignorant of the fact that John McCain had twice voted against measures that would have required insurance companies to cover birth control once in 2003 and again in 2005. These are mistakes that Cindy would not have made.
Certainly Cindy McCain would make a much better economic advisor to her husband than Phil and Wendy Gramm. She, of the infamous Enron scandal and we all know her husband. The ex-senator who pushed for so much deregulation of the Mortgage financial markets, when he was a paid lobbyist for UBS, that the markets would have collapsed if the Federal Reserve had not intervened to save them. I am certain that Mrs. McCain would never think of calling economic hard pressed American families,” a bunch of cry babies and whiners” as Mr. Gramm did.
While we are on the topic of lobbyist please Cindy talk to your husband about Randy Scheunemann one of his top aids for foreign policy. I Would advise him that it really looks bad to not only have Mr. Scheunemann, but the over 24 other paid lobbyist on his campaign staff. Mr. Scheunemann is really an embarrassment because his firm has been paid over $800,000 by the government of the Republic of Georgia to represent their interest. After Russian troops entered Georgia, Senator McCain stated, “we are all Georgians now” do you think it may look to the American voter like a quid pro quo?
When you do get involved, Cindy, perhaps you could get John to go back to work. He has not been to congress once in the last four months. I know it is a small matter but he keeps talking about how congress has to get back to Washington and get things done. It is just a suggestion but maybe he could lead by example. By the way he did miss the vote on S.3335 which was defeated. This bill would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems. Then again, it does keep Senator McCain’s record perfect. He has now missed all eight energy votes in the senate since last year.
I am sorry to say, but I believe a role as a political advisor for Cindy McCain is not in the cards. The only time I heard her husband mention her was when he offered her up as eye candy for a gang of rowdy bikers at their convention. The Senator felt her worth to him, in his campaign, was to have her compete in The Miss Buffalo Chips Contest. Even though she is not a political advisor Mrs. McCain can still do her duty as the candidate’s wife. She should start by telling her husband that when speaking, he should not wear that Navy cap, pull his paints up so that the belt is almost up to his chest, and wave his right arm angrily in a robotic motion. He does not look like a cool Brad Pitt, but more like the angry old man character on Saturday Night Live. And oh yes that navy cap. Time to retire it, perhaps Cindy could go on a shopping spree and buy him a new wardrobe. She could start by buying him another hat maybe from Old Navy.