From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

The introduction to John McCain at the Republican National Convention last night was all about family values. There was the paean to his mother and father, the touching story of his and Cindy’s adoption of a baby girl from India, and then there was Cindy herself, who was the focus of much of a gauzy introductory film on McCain, and who also did the introductory speech, and who brought all the kids up on stage with her at the end.

Oddly missing from this warm, feel-good picture, however, was a single mention of McCain’s first wife Carol Shepp—the one who stood by him, raising their three kids, through his trying five years in a Vietnamese prison, only to be dumped upon his heroic return for a younger woman, despite, or because of, her having suffered permanent disabling and disfiguring injuries in an auto accident during his absence. As in a Stalin-era photo, she had been air-brushed from the McCain family tableau, even as her offspring were up there on the stage on display with the rest of the Senator’s spawn.

Now I’m not faulting McCain for leaving his wife for a younger, richer woman. Who knows what the relationship was like at the time. Maybe Shepp wanted him out of her life by the time he started slipping off to date beer heiress Cindy Lou Hensley. But if McCain and his campaign staff wanted to make him a poster child for “family values,” they should have had the basic integrity to explain that he didn’t always consider marriage a binding covenant, for better or worse, richer or poorer, and in sickness or in health. (If you want an unvarnished view of the real John McCain, read an interview with Carol McCain published last June in the UK newspaper, The Mail, headlined The Wife US Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind.)

McCain’s party, and his fundamentalist Christian backers, are always attacking efforts by gay Americans to win the right to marry by saying that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, but clearly, with over half of all those marriages between a man and a woman ending in divorce, it’s not all that sacred, and McCain is living testament to that hypocrisy.

But this was just the most blatant of a string of hypocrisies that ran on for four days in the Twin Cities.

Read more Left Behind