Palin’s most important achievement? Beauty queen

As our commenter of the day says, Palin is quite the trophy veep,
but it’s worse than that, as Brad Hicks explains:

Seriously, what in the fuck is it with John McCain and beauty queens? His first wife, Carol Shepp McCain, was a swimwear model. But she got into an automobile accident and became only normally attractive, so he cheated on her with a 17 years younger beauty pageant winner named Cindy Hensley, whom he ended up divorcing Carol for and marrying. Then she got to be middle aged and a little plastic looking, and what do you know, McCain starts being seen everywhere he goes with, and doing some potentially lucrative favors for, a cheerleader turned bribe lobbyist, named Vicki Iseman, who’s 13 years younger than Cindy. He gets outed on that, cuts off ties with her, and then a couple of months later (after viciously humiliating his wife in front of a group of bikers, to her face) he picks as his “running mate” yet another beauty pageant winner who’s almost half his age.

Is there even one woman, even one woman anywhere in his office, career, or personal life that he’s ever voluntarily associated with who hasn’t been a bikini model, cheerleader, or beauty queen? Or is that one of John McCain’s minimum qualifications for a woman to be worth being seen anywhere near him? Christ. Long family history in the big-ship navy, but no, he wants to be a fighter pilot, maybe be on the astronaut track — because fighter pilots and astronaut candidates get the hot chicks. He comes back from his tour of duty too uglied up (and, coincidentally, too retired from being a pilot/potential astronaut) to get the young fashion models and cheerleaders, so he miraculously ends up in the US Senate, and lands himself a good-looking heiress. She gets middle aged and he finds out that just being a Senator isn’t necessarily enough to attract the really hot babes, so he claws his way into an important committee chairmanship, so that lobbying firms will have to send him sexy women. That stops working, and now he wants to be President of the United States. For the love of all sacred gods, are we sure that John McCain has ever done anything in his entire life that wasn’t for the overtly creepy sexist reason of using his career to keep attracting sexy power-mad gold-diggers? Is that what this guy is all about?

To be honest, McCains simple if downright creepy horndogging and beauty queen fetish is a breath of fresh air compared to the usual perverse Republican practises. But just think what would happen if McCain did get to be president and then got caught with Palin doing a Lewinsky on him in the Oval Office. With a guy as unstable and prone to violent outburst as McCain, he would start a nuclear war with Iran to distract us, as the Republicans accused Clinton of doing in ’98…

PS I fixed your post. P

First Junkie

Cindy McCain field recognition guide

“She was blonde and beautiful. A rich man’s daughter who became a politically powerful man’s wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly.”

You’d think the media would jump on a juicy story of drug addiction, dishonesty and outright theft by a potential first lady, wouldn’t you? Can you imagine the furore, the accusations of druggy baby-mamadom, if it were Michelle Obama? She’d be in jail by now and her kids in foster care. But it’s Cindy McCain and she’s blonde and rich – so she’s not and they’re not.

No, blonde rich junkies don’t get pokey, they get put in the White House.

Salon, October 1999:

GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s wife Cindy took to the airwaves last week, recounting for Jane Pauley (on “Dateline”) and Diane Sawyer (on “Good Morning America”) the tale of her onetime addiction to Percocet and Vicodin, and the fact that she stole the drugs from her own nonprofit medical relief organization.

It was a brave and obviously painful thing to do.

It was also vintage McCain media manipulation.

I had deja vu watching Cindy McCain on television, perky in a purple suit with tinted pearls to match. It was so reminiscent of the summer day in 1994 when suddenly, years after she’d claimed to have kicked her habit, McCain decided to come clean to the world about her addiction to prescription painkillers.

I believe she wore red that day. She granted semi-exclusive interviews to one TV station and three daily newspaper reporters in Arizona, tearfully recalling her addiction, which came about after painful back and knee problems and was exacerbated by the stress of the Keating Five banking scandal that had ensnared her husband. To make matters worse, McCain admitted, she had stolen the drugs from the American Voluntary Medical Team, her own charity, and had been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The local press cooed over her hard-luck story. One of the four journalists spoon-fed the story — Doug McEachern, then a reporter for Tribune Newspapers, now a columnist with the Arizona Republic (and, it must be added, normally much more acerbic) — wrote this rather typical lead:

“She was blonde and beautiful. A rich man’s daughter who became a politically powerful man’s wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly.”

What McEachern and the others didn’t know was that, far from being a simple, honest admission designed to clear her conscience and help other addicts, Cindy McCain’s storytelling had been orchestrated by Jay Smith, then John McCain’s Washington campaign media advisor. And it was intended to divert attention from a different story, a story that was getting quite messy.Read the whole thing.

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