Cindy McCain
 

I haven't heard her mentioned much in the current election threads, mostly because she hasn't done anything noteworthy. Until last week "At a rally in Bethlehem, Pa. last week, Cindy McCain spoke about having two sons serving on active duty: "I'm proud of my sons, but let me tell you, the day that Senator Obama cast a vote not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body. I would suggest that Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day, and see what it means."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-..._b_134068.html

The article it self focuses more on the overall strain of the war on current military families and is one of the few i have read that in my opinion gives an accurate portrayal of the feelings of many military families.

As for Cindy's comment i think it was crass and offensive not to mention her husband also voted no for a different version of the same bill.

I'd love to see Cindy change shoes with military spouse for a day, instead of Obama being her. In fact I think a lot of politicians could benefit from a day in the shoes of a military spouse.

You think there's a significant difference emotionally between being a military spouse and a military parent?

No i think there is a significant difference between being an incredibly wealthy military parent and a military spouse whose just trying to scrape by while her spouse is gone for months at a time, and she's home working raising the kids and worrying about her spouse.

My feeling is that the shoes of Cindy McCain have a bit more padding than those worn by an average military spouse, parent, sibling, child.

dang...did you miss Cindy saying that Obama is running one of the dirtiest campaigns in history???

It was in that same peice of news about Obama not funding the military bill

Well, you could say the same thing about anyone compared to Cindy, couldn't you?

Yea you could. But Cindy herself is the one who suggested Obama does not know what a day in her life as a military parent is like. All im saying as someone who was the gf of a military member for almost 3 years, I would like to see her walk in my shoes or the shoes of many other military family members I know before she challenges Obama to walk in her's. I'd take Cindy's shoes over the shoes I wore when i dated my ex any day.

I was surpsrised to hear what Cindy McCain said at that rally.

I guess she's officially "fair game."

Did you see the New Yorker piece? She's been fair game for a while now.

I think the point that's trying to be made is that many military families (as in, spouses and children of enlistedmen) are often on food stamps and other forms of assistance because sometimes they're just not paid enough, even with signing bonuses. Not to mention the stress of "why can't we see daddy?" questions while your spouse is on tour.

We learned about some of those problems when I was studying for my master's degree - I guess that if you're single you can get by pretty well but when you're married, moving around all the time (so your spouse has trouble finding work) and you've got a couple of kids, money gets EXTREMELY tight.

I think it's dumb to keep up the criticism for that vote, but the counterpoint brought up on Huff Post and on this thread is equally dumb. "But Cindy McCain is rich!" is not in any way shape or form a logical response to the statement that Obama doesn't know what it's like to have a loved one deployed in the military. They're both true statements but they don't rebut each other in any way. Pointing out that Cindy is rich is just a red herring in responding to something she said which is true.

I think it's that it's harder to be a spouse than a mom?

I don't see the logic, either, both are true (that it's hard to be a parent and it's hard to be a wife).

However, I can see where the counterpoint is headed - I just don't think it's headed to the heart of the argument.

That was exactly my point. Yes I'm voting for Obama, But my anger at the comment made by Cindy McCain would be the same if it was made by Michelle Obama.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're angry about. It's only ok for military spouses to say that it's a shame politicians don't know what it feels like to be in their positions? So yes being a spouse is different than being a mother, but going "What is Cindy talking about, it's just her son, not her husband. Plus she's rich!" is a pretty illogical reaction in my mind.

It has nothing to do with it being Cindy's son over her husband or brother or any other family member. It comes from her making the statement that Obama has no clue what its like to live her life as a military mom. (Which is true) But my feeling is that Cindy's experience is drastically different from that of the average military family member.

I feel that before she tells a civilian (political candidate or not) to walk in her shoes, she should walk in the shoes of your average military family member. Maybe if she did that she would see why many of them support a plan for Iraq that has a timeline involved in it. (that plan happens to be Obama's)

No... can you give me a link UGAalum94?

Here's the part I don't understand. The guy who wants to bring the troops home as soon as possible is not supportive of them? But the guy who says we could be there for 50 years, is? I think that if I was a military mom or spouse, the thing I would want most is for my loved one to be home again, safe and sound. And that's not directed to Cindy McCain, it's everybody who says that wanting to get out of Iraq ASAP is not being supportive of the troops.

Second that!!!!

My other issue with her statement which I forgot to mention was her suggestion that people come to see the troops who are deploying and to see their smiling faces and them cheering and being excited to go serve are country. In my experience and i know a decent amount of guys who have been over there none of them were smiling or cheering or excited. And if it was their 2nd or more tour and knew exactly what it was like there they were even less enthused.

I think the idea that their happy and excited going over there is a complete fallacy. The suicide rate of military members is up. I dont know if its up by 2 or 200 people, the point is IT'S UP.... That wouldn't be happening if troop moral was up.

Coming directly from a former military spouse (myself), it is hard. Most of you know my story. (Pregnant two weeks before deployment, living in Germany, etc.) My husband was gone for 15 months. Yes, it was hard. We didn't struggle financially, because we had housing, COLA, healthcare. My husband was a SGT, so I think we were considered average. I now have two children, who are far too young to be military, but I can say that the ache for a child far surpasses that of a spouse. While my husband and I missed each other dearly while he was away, the 5 1/2 minutes that my son was away from us to have tubes put in his ears, was the longest, emptiest most fearful time of either of our lives. I can't imagine taking a person that I created, and having him in harms way without my constant supervision. The lack or abundance of money doesn't change how much you care for your children.

In the other argument, supporting the person who wants to remove troops vs. keeping them there. I have many current and former military members in my family. My nephew has experienced a great deal of PTSD, but he says that he'd drop everything and go back. My husband has said the same thing, he has said it's a waste for us to be there, but pulling out is not the right way to go either.

I just think in keeping with Obama's Senior Class President running speech, 'You want out of Iraq? Okay! Let's get outta there!' It's much more deep than just taking everyone out, and I don't really think that he's thought it through...as with most of his stances.

Most veterans I know really think we should stay the course. I admit I haven't spoken to as many veterans of the War on Terror, but the Vietnam era vets I am close to want us to get out of there in a way that we didn't back in the 70s. Vietnamization was kind of a joke, and then we just left all of Southeast Asia to collapse.

Why you gotta bring morals into this, huh?

The troop suicide rate is still lower than that of the general population though. I also read an article suggesting that part of the reason is that the push for increased recruitment is bringing a lot of people in a prime socioeconomic demographic for suicide anyways (young people, often from a lower economic background) and that any time you have active combat duty then people are going to be exposed to stressful situations that may exasperate existing dispositions toward suicide.

I agree that it's not so easy to pull out as Obama seems to think it is, but I also think that once he gets in and gets a fuller picture of what's going on in there, by being educated by the CJCS and his pick for SecDef, he's going to realize that we can't "just pull out." You're right - I don't think he's completely thought it through. Timelines are good, but they need to be extended timelines, allowing for multiple setbacks.

FWIW, al-Qa'ida wasn't very active in Iraq before we went in, but they've been pretty active there, now. If that's who we're really afraid of I think we have to engage them there, rather than engage them here.

Regardless, McCain has some weirmo ideas about Iraq, too, and other countries surrounding Iraq. I'd rather go with Obama (who I'm confident will change his plan in regard to Iraq/national security and whose domestic policies I like better) than McCain. Just my thoughts though.

What's funny is a lot of people I went to grad school with (I just finished my Master's Degree in Public and International Affairs, Security and Intelligence Studies in August) are feeling the same way. We were pretty outraged over the Guantanamo decision (not because it was a wrong one, just that it shouldn't have gone through SCOTUS), and were in line with McCain. As the election draws nearer, more and more of my classmates have jumped ship and decided to vote for Obama. These are intel/national security people, many of which are already working at various intelligence agencies and defense agencies in DC. FWIW.

Now I feel like I've just made a stump speech for Obama. Oops.

Were the active, and we just didn't know it? That's a tough judgement call. The middle east is much more under the microscope than before, so I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison. You are right on in saying keep them there, but they certainly seem to be drifting west!

When it comes to national security, I am much more in favor of someone who's 'been-there-done-that'. McCain has been living la military vida loca since conception. His plans for proceding are from firsthand seeing what works and what doesn't. It's not just this is what we'll tell people, and then I'll see what my people tell me. The impact of how that is handled has the potential to affect everyone more than just those with military in the fam. If this isn't done correctly, socialized medicine and abortion will be the least of our problems!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all

It's polite in tone, but Cindy doesn't come off well.

"The campaign has attempted to portray McCain’s past addiction to prescription painkillers and her public statements about it as a Betty Ford-style story of altruism and accountability.

But Cindy McCain’s openness about that period has not been entirely voluntary, and hers was not the only life damaged by her addiction.

From 1988 to 1995, McCain ran and funded her own charity, the American Voluntary Medical Team, delivering supplies and assistance to countries in crisis. In 1991, she hired a young man from Nebraska named Tom Gosinski, the former manager of government and international affairs for America West Airlines, to be a director of A.V.M.T. He became a close friend of the McCain family, and gave swimming lessons to Cindy’s sons.
In the summer of 1992, Gosinski began to notice that his boss was behaving erratically. He kept a journal, which was later obtained by two reporters, Amy Silverman and Jeremy Voas, and published, in 1994, by the local alternative weekly paper, the Phoenix New Times. On July 20, 1992, Gosinski wrote:

I do not know what Cindy is up to but it appears as though she is trying to use several doctors’ DEA #’s so that she can acquire drugs for personal use. . . . I certainly hope that Cindy does not get herself or AVMT in trouble.

The journal entries grow increasingly fretful throughout the summer. In late August, Gosinski wrote about an upcoming mission to Africa:

August 28, 1992: Mark Salter in John McCain’s Washington office has stated that the State Department and the Department of Defense believe it is not safe to travel to Somalia or the northern regions of Kenya. Cindy insists that we are going to go on the trip and that it may be wise for us to pack guns. She is absolutely crazy—I don’t know how to load a gun let alone shoot one.

About a month later, the situation came to a head:

October 2, 1992: Well, it is done. Last night Jim and Smitty confronted Cindy regarding her dependency to prescription drugs and she admitted to her addiction.

In December, Gosinski discovered a prescription for painkillers that had been made out in his name by the charity’s doctor, John M. Johnson. Cindy McCain had filled it at her neighborhood pharmacy. Gosinski was fired in mid-January, and soon afterward met with the Drug Enforcement Administration to discuss his former boss’s behavior.
A year later, Gosinski filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit. The McCains retaliated by enlisting John Dowd, a Washington lawyer who had helped extricate them from an earlier scandal, when McCain was one of five senators accused of interfering with the 1989 federal investigation of Charles Keating, Jr., the disgraced chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings & Loan Association. McCain had accepted more than a hundred thousand dollars in contributions from Keating, a family friend. Keating had a vacation home in the Bahamas, and the McCains had flown there with him several times. Cindy claimed to have misplaced receipts that supposedly showed that the McCains had reimbursed Keating for these trips. (With her father, Cindy had also invested three hundred and fifty-nine thousand dollars in a shopping mall that Keating was constructing. When a writer for the Arizona Republic first called McCain to ask about his wife’s business ties to Keating, McCain called the reporter a “liar” and an “idiot.”) McCain was eventually exonerated, but he called his involvement with Keating “the worst mistake of my life.”
Cindy McCain wrote in a column for Newsweek in 2001 that during the Keating Five investigation “the painkillers cushioned me. The newspaper articles didn’t hurt as much, and I didn’t hurt as much. I can remember sitting in the Senate hearings, listening to Howell Heflin saying terrible things not just about my husband but about me. The pills made me feel euphoric and free.”
By the late summer of 1994, the New Times and the Arizona Republic were on the verge of exposing Cindy McCain’s addiction and her misconduct at A.V.M.T. When the McCains learned that the story was about to come out, they called a press conference. Cindy admitted stealing drugs from A.V.M.T., and claimed to have completed a federal diversion program. She made no mention of Gosinski or of implicating her employees in illegal activity. John M. Johnson lost his state medical license. Tom Gosinski let his wrongful-termination suit expire and went back to work for America West."

I read this same story in the Washington Post a few months back. This is what kills me about people portraying Cindy McCain as some great altruistic woman! She used her own charity to procure drugs to feed her habit, cost a physician his medical license and fired a man from the charity for daring to expose her illegal habit. Now she tries to act like it was just a little matter of a personal triumph over addiction.

Agreed!

That's great that it's lower than another suicide rate. But guess what it's generally a bad thing for there to be a suicide rate in general. Yes it's unavoidable but it's not a positive statistic.

I don't care what suicide rate the military's is lower than. It could be lower than 400 other demographic groups rates. The POINT is that IT HAS GONE UP! If thats not a simple enough statement there are MORE suicides amongst military now than a year ago.

It should NOT matter who the group is or where their statistic measures up. What should matter is that its increased.

I don't understand how a person can argue that an increase in a suicide rate is NOT a bad or alarming thing????:confused::confused::confused::confused:

It's bad, but not alarming. Because of a recruiting push, the army is increasingly made up of poorer young men, one of the most suicide prone groups in America. And maybe its just me, but it seems logical that any time the Army is fighting a war, the suicide rate is going to go up. It isn't that they are sad and want to come home because they don't support this war anymore, it's that in war you are going to see things that some peoples' minds can't easily handle that just might push them over the edge. I just don't see any other trend that would be logical.

The suicide rate has gone up because the Army is active now instead of just training and being ready. Guys who were at home are now half a world away. That will tend to be depressing. People who have never been exposed to carnage or had to kill someone before have now. That's depressing too. You wish it wouldn't happen, but the fact of the matter is that when the Army starts actually fighting, suicide rates are going to go up. It isn't because they are fighting an unpopular war or because the Army has low morale that it rose, it's because the very nature of actually fighting a war puts the brain under unique stresses that it's never had to handle before - and some people can't handle them on top of everything else going on in their lives.

EXACTLY! Everyone is able to handle stress in different ways. At the first deployment, morale was very high! There were several events leading up to them leaving. What I think people don't understand is when you join the military, you sign a contract. It is the same contract for ALL four branches. I tried to find a link, but don't have time to scour this morning. My husband and I read his over very thoroughly. There is a war clause. It basically says, 'If you are called to war, you will go.' It doesn't say, 'You get to decide if you want to go or not. And, if you go and you're not happy, we'll send you home.' I'm sure that most that sign it don't read it, and those that do kind of laughed when they got to that part. We (hubby) enlisted in January of 2001. I remember sitting on the side of the tub, and he said, "Well, it's not like we'll really even have another war!" I concurred, "Yeah, we're way to technologically advanced to let that happen again!" 10 months later....well...you know... The point is, you make a choice to serve, and you commit that if your commander-in-chief tells you to go, you go. It is the effing ARMY/NAVY/AIR FORCE/MARINE CORPS, what is the point if not to be preparing for defense.

Further, they are making major strides to help decompress these guys when they come back. There were several shrink sessions on the way home from deployment. Some of them were pretty dumb "How do you feel about the Iraqi people?" Anyone could easily lie their way through it. I think that's where a lot of the problems come. One person that we are aquainted with was attached to a very 'active' unit. He has since been released for severe PTSD. He calls freaking out, because he's hearing voices. However, he REFUSES to get help (which the Army pays for!) because he's too much of a man for it. Yeah, it sucks, but I have no sympathy. They are offering the tools, so help them help you. My hubby is not so severe, but I do try to get him together with one of the guys that he was deployed with periodically. His wife and I agree it helps them to let off some of the steam. THey'll talk to us, but it's easier with someone who's been there.

Just to Nanners, you're just trying to make it so cut and dry, and it's not. A lot of the soldiers who have killed themselves had much more going on...cheating wives, inability to get back into the swing of noncombat life (it took SEVERAL months for my husband to not slow down before driving under and overpass!)