adventures in political email: part 3

regulars to ichf will remember that this blog started because some conservative cat tried to belittle obama for being just "good looking and well-spoken" or some nonsense. i got mad, wrote a response email to the guy, and decided that i need to start a blog.

anonymous conservative jackass is at it again. this email showed up in my inbox this morning:

However great Obama may be, you're only as good as the company you keep. Now that we've seen his "religious leaders", here's one more reason Obama's not going to win:


Subject: McCain's Wife

Not just another pretty face!

The "Other" McCain.......(More than meets the eye.)

While Obama's wife has been hating America, complaining
about the war and undermining our troops serving in Iraq
and Afghanistan, McCain's wife has been worrying about
her sons who actually are fighting or planning to fight in
the war on terror. One, in fact, was until a few months ago
deployed in Iraq during some of the worst violence.

You don't hear the McCains talk about it, but their 19-year-
old Marine, Jimmy, is preparing for his second tour of duty.
Their 21-year-old son, Jack, is poised to graduate from
Annapolis and also could join the Marines as a second
lieutenant.

The couple made the decision not to draw attention to their
sons out of respect for other families with sons and daughters in harm's' way.

Cindy also says she doesn't want to risk falling apart on the
campaign trail talking about Jimmy who was so young when
he enlisted she had to sign consent forms for his medical
tests before he could report for duty and potentially upsetting parents of soldiers who are serving or have been killed.

The McCains want to make sure their boys get no special
treatment. Same goes for their five other children, including
a daughter they adopted from Bangladesh. During a visit to
Mother Teresa's orphanage there, Cindy noticed a dying
baby.. The orphanage could not provide the medical
care needed to save her life. So she brought the child home
to America for the surgery she desperately needed. The baby is now their healthy, 16-year-old daughter, Bridget.

Though all seven McCain children including two Senator
McCain adopted from his first marriage are supportive of
their father, they prefer their privacy to the glare of the
campaign trail.

Another daughter, Meghan, 23, helps him behind the scenes.
Cindy McCain not only cherishes her children, but also her
country, which in an election year filled with America-bashing, is a refreshing novelty. She seethed when she heard Michelle Obama's unpatriotic remarks that she only recently grew proud of America. 'I am very proud of my country,' Mrs. McCain asserted.

She also may be tougher than the other women in the race.
While Hillary thinks she's come under sniper fire on
mission trips abroad, Cindy has actually seen violence.
She witnessed a boy get blown up by a mine in Kuwait during a trip with an international group that removes land mines from war-torn countries.

Mrs. McCain also is a hands-on philanthropist. She sits on
the board of Operation Smile, which arranges for plastic
surgeons to fix cleft palates and other birth defects. She also
has helped organize relief missions to Micronesia.

During a scuba-diving vacation to the islands, Mrs.McCain
took a friend to a local hospital to have a cut treated. She
was shocked, and saddened, by what she saw. 'They opened
the door to the OR, where the supplies were, and there were
two cats and a whole bunch of rats climbing out of the sterile
supplies,' she recalled. 'They had no X-ray machine, no beds. To me, it was devastating because it was a U.S. Trust territory.'

As soon as she returned home, she arranged for medical
equipment and teams of doctors to be sent to treat the island children.

Michelle Obama contributes to CARE, which fights global
poverty and works to empower poor women. Cindy sits on its board.


what what what what what WHAT?
WHAT THE FUCK?
just like all of you other righteously indignant types, i felt compelled to leave a reasoned response that masked my violent anger. analyst smash:

[Name Omitted], please do not send this uncited chain email garbage and pass it off as truth. It demeans everyone's intelligence, and turns the political process into rumor-mongering and gossip. Moreover, I think judging a person by the supposed quality of their spouses is a poor meterstick for a president's performance. After all, by that measure, we should all have voted for Hillary. I hear her spouse actually used to be president, too.

I have several issues with this saintly depiction of the McCain family. Let me tell you another story about John and his wife - his first one. This was during McCain's days at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, when he was more of a spoiled slacker playboy scion of an influential American family than any kind of leader (much like the man he's attempting to succeed). In fact, he graduated 894 out of a total 899 students (source: Wikipedia). Before John was sent to Vietnam and infamously imprisoned in a POW camp for five and a half years, he met and married to a beautiful woman named Carol. He even adopted her two children from a previous marriage, which you mentioned in your email.

When John got back from Vietnam, he was horrified to find out that Carol had changed dramatically from how he remembered her - she had been horribly disfigured in a car accident while he was gone, leaving her much shorter, and walking with a limp - a far change from the model (literally) that he married. This whole story, plus some strong words for McCain from Ross Perot, are available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1024927/The-wife-John-McCain-callously-left-behind.html.

John met Cindy McCain when she was 25. He was still married, but that didn't stop him from "aggressively courting" her. He later divorced Carol, and married Cindy. It is well-documented that even after he married Cindy, he continued to sleep around. This continues to this day, with an under-reported story from last year about McCain's affair with a lobbyist, which may have led to improper governmental favors for her company (source: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1715403,00.html, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/20/john-mccain-affair-links_n_87690.html). Incidentally enough, Cindy was heir to the company and fortune of Hensley and Co., one of the largest Anheiser-Busch distributors in America. While John was anything but a native Arizonan, Cindy was. Thanks mostly to the strength of her connections, the former POW and war hero become the junior Senator from Arizona but one year after he moved to the state (source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02EFDF1439F934A15751C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=6). Kinda sounds this lady i know who ran for president on the back of her husband's coattails.

Also, please do not look down on Obama's "religious leaders" as you call them, while ignoring McCain's spiritual mentors. Jeremiah Wright is fucking crazy - we can all agree on that. However, the words of John Hagee and Rod Parsley, the men that McCain has called spiritual guides, are equally hateful and bilious. Parsley has gone on record as saying that Islam is an "Anti-Christ religion" and Mohammed as "a mouthpiece of spiritual evil" (source: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4905624&page=1). You can believe this if you like, and you can ignore those comments from these guys as just pastors being pastors. Judging by what you have said in the past about your moral values, I have doubts that you care that these guys have upset one of the three Abrahamic religions, or that they think homosexuals are sinners, or that they want to make policy decisions based on the possibility of the rapture being at hand. Just know that ripping on Wright while turning a blind eye on these two makes a person look like a conservative tool at best and a racist at worst.

However, before you label me as some sort of apologist for religious extremists, understand that I am simply trying to avoid my country getting involved in a holy war (a clearly un-American endeavor). These hateful, closed-minded values are un-American, and make us all look just like the religious extremists that we are supposedly at war with.

So what if Michelle Obama was saying she was proud of America for the first time in her adult life? Yeah, that's bad PR. But I can tell you from my own personal experience, that for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of the democratic process on a federal level. I'm not going to go into an anti-Bush tirade here. We all know the man's an inept war criminal. Watching him shit upon the values that we all hold dear as Americans has turned me into the guy who writes political rants like this.

It saddens me that a man who values religion and family values so highly will look the other way on John McCain's many moral improprities in the name of a political party that he believes is speaking for him. I highly encourage you to look deeper at these candidates than the junk mail that shows up in your inbox, in the name of your fellow citizens and the country they live in.

i feel better now, and can get to work like a good little analyst.