In 1991, Cindy McCain visited Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh and decided to adopt and bring home a terribly sick baby. That baby is now 17 year-old daughter Bridget McCain. About this fact — this noble and extraordinary fact – there is no dispute. So now a person who devotes an inordinate amount of sentimental space on his blog to his beagle — fresh from a few days’ effort to impeach a McCain story about a Vietnamese prison guard who drew the sign of the cross in the dirt in front of him on Christmas Day while he was tied up in ropes by asserting and then backing away from the contention that it was borrowed from Alexander Solzhenitsyn – is trying to make a scandal out of the fact that the McCain website and some news stories feature a possibly untrue tale of Cindy being asked directly by Mother Teresa to take the baby home:
Now, the question is whether and when Cindy McCain met with Mother Teresa….Can we nail down the date of that meeting? Or are these questions no one should dare ask of a POW war hero?
This is evidently beyond the pale, and deserving of the horribly obnoxious inference present in the overheated prose on display here, because “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.” Actually, no. The fact that Cindy McCain would have decided to adopt Bridget on her own and without prompting from a living saint only speaks better of her. There is no other fact here that matters. The search for deceptions in the midst of accounts of entirely praiseworthy behavior is a peculiar undertaking, to say the least. The requirements of civility prevent me from saying more than the least.
