Telling stories and lies ... the memories of John and Cindy McCain

There have already been numerous examples in the presidential campaign of candidates embellishing or fudging aspects of their life stories to boost their appeal. Some of the more famous examples are Hillary taking sniper fire and John McCain changing his football allegiances.

We have recently added John McCain adding to his POW memories and now another one on the McCain front -- this one involving Cindy. There is a lot of evidence pointing to the campaign changing this story within the last few years (actually months) to add whipped cream and a cherry on top.

"As was pointed out yesterday by the Christian Science Monitor, the McCain campaign was called out for lying about the purported urging of Cindy McCain by Mother Teresa herself to adopt two children at her orphanage back in 1991. Turns out, McCain never met or even spoke with Mother Teresa on that trip. Once confronted by the Monitor about the deception, the campaign quickly erased such claims from the website, as it did with Cindy's family recipes, which were proved to be lifted from the Food Network. But after doing some research, this deception was no careless accident, but rather another shameless and deliberate attempt by the campaign to reinvent and embellish the McCain family history in time for his 2008 presidential bid."

Some other bloggers take offense at the deception. Andrew Sullivan from the Left:

"This is the pattern: A story that shows the McCains' genuine compassion and faith is embellished over the years to make the story a little more perfect, a little more salient, a little better as a narrative. It's especially important to add these embellishments when your goal is to appeal to a fundamentalist base, when your own prickly, personal and private faith isn't very marketable. And when your adopted daughter is Bangladeshi, and when that fact has been disgracefully used against you by the Bush machine in 2000, and when some fringes of your base get queasy about multi-racial families, what better way to describe the adoption than as something Mother Teresa herself "implored" you to do? More interesting: the first actual reports of this event do not mention this fact. They are added later."

And from the Right:

"Cindy McCain Should Know Better: I hate to admit it, but Cindy McCain appears to have been caught telling an embarrassing untruth about how she came to adopt her daughter. Originally, she was claiming that Mother Theresa personally convinced her to adopt her daughter Bridget. This is disappointing, not just because it's apparently untrue that Cindy McCain spoke to Mother Theresa, but because it makes you scratch your head. The McCains adopted a little girl from overseas. That's an amazing, incredibly compassionate thing to do. Why embellish a story like that? Granted, "fish stories" aren't necessarily unusual. People will add a little detail here or there to make a story better, but it doesn't look good when a politician does it -- and since John McCain has repeated the story, it looks like Mr. "Straight Talk" is going to end up having to explain on the campaign trail why he and his wife fudged a story about something as intimate as the circumstances under which they came to adopt their own daughter. They should know better than that."

They cheapen their story with crap like this.
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