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Calling All CounterPunchers!
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Calling All CounterPunchers!
Annual Fundraising AppealWe interrupt your regular reading habits to bring you the following important announcement: CounterPunch needs your financial support!
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Today's Stories October 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Vijay Prashad October 29, 2008 Arno J. Mayer Eric Toussaint Matt Gonzalez Steven Conn Jonathan Cook Patrick Bond Ramzi Kysia Douglas Valentine Stephen Martin Margaret Dooley-Sammuli Amee Chew Website of the Day
October 28, 2008 James G. Abourezk Andy Worthington Gary Leupp Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whitney Gregory V. Button Ralph Nader P. Sainath Martha Rosenberg Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 27, 2008 Michael Hudson Barbara Rose Johnston John Dinges Mike Whitney Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power Alan Farago David Michael Green Andy Worthington George Wuerthner Niranjan Ramakrishnan Website of the Day October 24 / 26, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Don Santina Scott Boehm Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Linn Washington Jr. Nicole Colson Bernard Chazelle Brian Jones Christopher Brauchli Benjamin Dangl Val Strange Steve Early David Macaray Allison Kilkenny Richard Rhames Jim Bell Kris De Welde Barry Clemson Adam Engel Mark Scaramella Tuli Kupferberg Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 23, 2008 Allan J. Lichtman Todd Chretien John Ross Peter Morici Mats Svensson Marlene Martin Robert Jensen / Margaret Kimberley Deepak Tripathi David Morris Website of the Day October 22, 2008 Brian Cloughley Heather Gray Jeff Birkenstein Ralph Nader DC Larson David Swanson Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth Larry Everest Robert Fantina Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Website of the Day October 21, 2008 Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Corey D. B. Walker Steve Breyman Eric Toussaint Wajahat Ali Robert Weitzel Brendan Cooney Dave Lindorff Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing Patrick B. Barr Omar Barghouti Website of the Day October 20, 2008 Michael Hudson Anthony DiMaggio Tariq Ali Uri Avnery Bill Quigley Ben Rosenfeld David Michael Green William S. Lind Chris Genovali Stephen Martin Howard Lisnoff David Yearsley Website of the Day October 17 / 19, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Pam Martens Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whtney Michael D. Yates Suzanne Smith Carl Boggs Ralph Nader Fidel Castro Dave Marsh Saul Landau Jo Guldi Kevin Zeese Larry Everest Steve Early David Macaray Ben Terrall Missy Beattie Don Monkerud Helen Redmond Dan Bacher Wajahat Ali Farzana Versey Vladimir Frolov Kim Nicolini Poets Basement Website of the Day October 16, 2008 Mike Whitney Jonathan Cook Ayesha Ijaz Khan Alan Maass Chuck O'Connell Mary Lynn Cramer P. Sainath Andy Worthington Peter Gelderloos Stephen Martin Douglas Valentine Website of the Day
October 15, 2008 Steve Conn William P. O'Connor Robert Weissman Jonathan M. Feldman Ron Jacobs Conn Hallinan Justin Podur Karl Grossman Dave Lindorff Eric Walberg Martha Rosenberg Uri Avnery Monica Benderman Website of the Day
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October 30, 2008 What the Doctors SawMcCain's Women ProblemsBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN John McCain’s charges of sexism against Barack Obama must ring mighty hollow to those who know him best, and we dare say his second wife Cindy would have an acerbic comment or two of her own if freed from all constraints. The social culture of the Naval Academy at Annapolis shaped McCain. His own recollections of his less than stellar career there focus mainly on his drunken escapades and relentless sexual predations. He met his first wife, Carol, in Annapolis while he was hanging out with the group self-styled “the bad bunch”. She left her first husband for him, bringing her two children with her, soon becoming pregnant with Sidney. On accounts of this period, McCain grew restive, had some affairs and became a fixture on the party circuit. At the end of 1966, he volunteered for active service as a bomber pilot in Vietnam. He was shot down ten months later, and spent the next five and half years as a prisoner of war. Meanwhile Carol, a former fashion model, was bringing up their three children. During Christmas 1969, while visiting her parents’ house, Carol took her car to deliver presents, slid off the icy road, hit a tree, and was hurled through the windshield. Very badly hurt, she lay in the snow for several hours before being discovered. The accident crushed her hip and mangled her legs so badly that surgeons had to remove large sections of her leg bones, shortening her by 5 inches and leaving her with a limp and in more or less permanent pain. She refused to send word to McCain, saying “he’s got enough problems.” Ross Perot stepped in to pay her medical bills. McCain came home in 1973 and, according to friends, was “appalled” at his wife’s changed appearance. It wasn’t long before he sought comfort with others. His friend Robert Timberg says, “John started carousing and running around with women.” Through Perot, he met Ronald Reagan when the latter was governor of California, and both Ron and Nancy became particularly fond of Carol and put her on their payroll. In 1979 McCain, in his early 40s, met the 25-year-old Cindy Hensley, an heiress to her father’s beer distribution empire in Phoenix. It was at a cocktail party in Honolulu. Cindy recalls, “He kind of chased me around the hors d’oeuvres table. I was trying to get something to eat, and I thought, ‘This guy’s kind of weird.’ I was kind of trying to get away from him.” McCain pursued Hensley, inviting her to Washington, D.C. He embarked on an affair with Cindy and suddenly told a stunned Carol that he was leaving her. McCain began living with Cindy in January of 1980. He divorced Carol in April of that year and married Cindy a month later in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Biltmore hotel in Scottsdale. Friends of Carol were disgusted by McCain’s conduct in dumping the wife who had kept the home fires burning through his time as a POW. The Reagans never forgave him and stood firmly by Carole. Nancy Reagan barely consented to endorse McCain this year. McCain recalls, “My divorce from Carol, whom the Reagans loved, caused a change in our relationship. Nancy was particularly upset with me and treated me on the few occasions we encountered each other after I came to Congress with a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear.” In a story in the London Daily Mail, Sharon Churcher wrote on June 8 of this year:
Also quoted by Churcher is Ted Sampley, a Special Forces veteran: Cindy urged a return to Phoenix in part because many in John’s circle in Washington, D.C., gave them the cold shoulder. Not only did Cindy pony up for Carol’s medical care, but she staked McCain’s first congressional race in Arizona in 1982 because the Reagans leaned on the Republican National Committee to turn off the funding tap. From now on, relations between John and Cindy McCain became remote: he mostly in Washington and she in Phoenix, living across the street from her parents. It was at this point she developed the initial business relationship with Charles Keating, the financier and anti-porn crusader, whose fraudulent operations with Lincoln Savings and Loan very nearly derailed McCain’s career after exposure of Keating’s lavish patronage of McCain as one of his protectors in Congress. In 1986, Cindy and her father James invested $400,000 in a shopping center being developed by Keating. An indefatigable traveler, given to impulsive excursions around the world in his private jet, Keating took along Cindy and the children and, occasionally, John. Amid these voyages, Cindy developed with Keating the idea of financing the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) to supply aid to disaster-struck areas. Keating, an ardent Catholic, also introduced Cindy to Mother Teresa. This relationship led to Cindy’s adoption of a baby born in Bangladesh. The adoption came as a complete surprise to McCain. These trips and the relationship with Keating attracted the scrutiny of investigators probing McCain for ethical misconduct. Beleaguered by accusations that he had been shielding a top-rung corporate criminal, McCain appears to have blamed his wife for the political millstone Keating had become. According to two emergency room physicians in Phoenix, interviewed by CounterPunch, it was at this time that Cindy McCain made her first appearance at a Phoenix hospital’s emergency room with bruising and marks – “black eye and scratches” – that were consistent with physical violence. There would be at least two more visits to the emergency room by Cindy, featuring similar injuries over the next five years – i.e., between 1988 and 1993. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the period during which Cindy developed an addiction to opiate painkillers, including Percocet and Vicodin. She was taking 20 pills a day, with a physician at AVMT writing illegal prescriptions. When one of the employees of AVMT discovered the illegal prescriptions and told the executive director, he was fired. He promptly alerted the Drug Enforcement Agency, which opened up an investigation. Cindy was rushed into a drug treatment center and went into a pretrial diversion program, thus escaping prosecution. She paid for the DEA’s investigation. She claimed she became addicted to painkillers because of back pain and the stress associated with Keating’s prosecution and conviction. Cindy’s addiction came as a shock to McCain. Her parents, who apparently had closer contact her, did notice and attempted some interventions. A somewhat eerie insight into McCain’s psyche can be found in his version of an ape joke that was popular in the mid-1980s. The usual version ran along the following lines. A flight attendant is the sole survivor of a crash in the African forest. She meets an ape, who makes her his mistress. Eventually, she gets home and confides her experience to a friend, who exclaims, “That’s terrible.” “It is,” the flight attendant wails sadly. “He never calls, he never writes.” McCain’s very violent version of this joke was reported in the Tucson Citizen, on October 27, 1986: “McCain: Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?’” Cindy found San Diego agreeable, and John was almost always far, far away. In 2007, she was asked by San Diego Magazine, “When the election’s over, do you think you might consider a western White House in Coronado?” “Absolutely. I love Coronado. Listen, to me there’s nothing better than waking up and seeing the sun come up over the water on the bay there and watching the Navy SEALs run up and down the beach. That’s a great way to live.” “How many days a month do you see your husband now?” “Not many. Two or three, maybe.” CounterPunch noticed that in the early fall, when political circumstance brought briefly them together, Cindy had her arm in a sling and featured a bandaged wrist. The McCain campaign said it was repetitive handshaking disorder. Maybe. On the other hand, McCain publicly joked this summer about how “I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago.” (This was in Nevada, in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun.) The year has been trying for Cindy. On February 21, the New York Times described at great length how, during his first White House run in 2000, McCain had developed a close relationship with a young blonde lobbyist Vicki Iseman. The couple had taken frequent flights together on corporate jets as she tried to convince him to favor the telecom companies she was lobbying for. His staffers were so vexed at the indiscreet association that they ordered her blocked from McCain’s office. During the tense press conference after the Times story, Cindy’s frozen face was widely noted. Her inner thoughts may perhaps have been directed toward the yoga instructor in San Diego, reckoned by some in the yoga community in that city to be a source of consolation to the Hensley beer heiress.
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