by CHQ Staff
After showing up to torpedo the repeal of Obamacare, cancer-stricken Senator John McCain has been absent from the Senate for the better part of five months, leaving the Republican agenda frozen with a mere one vote majority over the obstructionist Democrats.
Senator McCain is rumored to be now so ill that only family can see him and plans for his funeral and lying in state at the Capitol are being openly discussed.
What hasn’t been publicly discussed until now is who will succeed Senator McCain, whose term runs until 2022, but rumors are now swirling in Arizona that the Senator’s wife – Cindy Hensley McCain – has privately made it clear she wants to be appointed to succeed him.
Mrs. McCain, known for her white blonde hair and hard-edged fashion choices, is the daughter of the late Jim Hensley, who built one of the largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributors in the United States.
And, in the minds of many, it was the Hensley wealth and ambition that built John McCain’s political career.
In a 2008 article for The New Republic, Noam Scheiber wrote, “the reality behind this political creation myth is far more complex. McCain was a relative nobody when he married Cindy Hensley–a middle-aged divorcé working a mid-level job in a far-off bureaucracy. It was the Hensleys who would breathe life into his prospects and provide a springboard for his ascent. Their ambitions burned every bit as brightly as his did. Except that, unlike McCain, they’d long since hidden their motives from public view.”
According to Scheiber, all told, McCain raised about $313,000 for his winning Arizona primary campaign: About $170,000 of that came from personal loans. The same year, John and Cindy McCain reportedly received more than $750,000 from Hensley-controlled ventures. McCain’s Navy pension contributed an additional $31,000 to the household’s finances, reported Scheiber.
The money was important, maybe crucial, but it wasn’t Cindy McCain’s only contribution to husband John’s political rise.
In Scheiber’s telling, every Monday, campaign manager Jerry Brooks held a meeting to discuss tactics with his top brass: Where should the candidate spend his time? What neighborhoods should the volunteers walk? Sometimes McCain made it, sometimes not. But Cindy almost always showed. When there was something she felt Hensley & Company could assist with, she’d pipe up and instruct Brooks to “call Delgado” that was, Bob Delgado, one of her father’s lieutenants.
The effort could be all-consuming, and Cindy’s involvement was sometimes excessive reported Scheiber. “Once in a while, I’d have something laid out that week and she didn’t want to do it, we’d have to talk about it for a while,” Brooks allowed. For example, Cindy would complain that the campaign had spent too much time walking one district and suggest another. “I’d say, ‘Cindy, we’ll have to talk to Jay [Smith] about that,’ ” Brooks recalled to Scheiber, which usually did the trick.
And since that first House campaign, Cindy McCain’s drive to, behind the scenes, run John McCain’s political and policy operation has only gotten worse.
In the run-up to the 2008 Republican primaries, John McCain vowed that he did not support Roe v Wade and would work to overturn it if elected.
Yet, as the UK Guardian reported back in 2008, when asked by CBS news whether she wanted to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court ruling that permitted women to seek abortions, Cindy McCain responded: “No, no.”
When the CBS anchor Katie Couric reminded Cindy McCain that “your husband does” want to revoke abortion rights, the aspiring first lady responded, “No, I don’t think he does,” reported the Guardian.
Two years later, Mrs. McCain became a poster girl for same sex marriage when she posed for photos endorsing pro-gay marriage forces in California.
Cindy McCain contacted NOH8 and offered to pose for the photo endorsement, the website said, according to the UK’s Telegraph. The homosexual rights group opposed Proposition 8 – the ballot measure passed by Californian voters in 2008 which banned same-sex marriage.
Mrs. McCain appeared with silver duct tape across her mouth and “NOH8” written on one cheek. The photo was posted on the radical homosexual group NOH8 campaign’s website.
Senator McCain was forced to issue a statement saying he remained opposed to same sex marriage, even as Mrs. McCain told Salon in 2013 “I think he’s coming around,” and credited her daughter Meghan with turning her into a homosexual rights activist.
Senator John McCain’s maverick personality and tendency to adopt the views of Democrats on issues such as amnesty for illegal aliens, restriction of free speech through radical limits on political campaigns, abortion and the radical homosexual agenda have long made him an outlier in the Republican Party who forced a perennial leftward crack in the Senate’s Republican Conference. With her radical leftist views on same sex marriage and opposition to the Republican Party’s platform position on abortion, the only thing worse than having John McCain in the Senate would be for him to be succeeded by his liberal wife Cindy.
Conservative Arizona should send a conservative Senator to Washington and we urge all our CHQ readers and friends in the Grand Canyon State to email Governor Doug Ducey or call him on the Phoenix line at 602-542-4331 or the Tucson line 520-628-6580 to tell him Cindy McCain does not represent your conservative values.
Is the United States ‘on its way’ to becoming just another Latin American ‘democracy’ where a few hundred extended families own and control most of the wealth of the nation and exercise all of its political power? When John McCain dies, there should be little sympathy beyond the usual for his widow. McCain is an elderly man who has lived a long and privileged life. His widow is financially secure from the benefits that she derives through him, and she herself is independently wealthy in the extreme from her own family’s wealth. In a true republic of approximately 330 million people which has the largest economy and the most powerful military force on earth, there is no need to resort to the same ‘handful of families’ to choose the successor of a powerful legislator who does not survive his full term of office. Any other political leader—like the Governor of Arizona—who assists in doing such a thing should be permanently ostracized and rejected forevermore from further political office by the electorate of that jurisdiction. Otherwise, in time, our country will awaken someday to discover that it is now just another ‘banana republic’ too.