CINDY

Posted at 7:35 p.m. ET

John Hinderaker at Power Line skewers the fading New York Times over its attempted hit piece on Cindy McCain this morning.  John says:

What is shocking about the piece is the tone it takes toward Cindy McCain. I don't think I've ever seen a Presidential candidate's spouse treated so negatively or so unfairly. It's a safe bet that the National Enquirer wouldn't have run this article; only the Times is this committed to putting politics above news judgment or basic fairness.

Sad to see what has become of a once-great newspaper. 

Back in July, Michael Gerson published a piece at Townhall.com, showing the real Cindy McCain, who has a long history of public service delivered without publicity:

KIGALI, Rwanda -- Cindy McCain's first visit to this country in 1994 was during the high season of roadblocks and machetes and shallow graves.

Following a call for help from Doctors Without Borders, McCain had assembled a medical team with the intention of setting up a mobile hospital in Rwanda. Arriving by private plane in mid-April, a couple of weeks into the massacres, she realized that the chaos made deploying her team impossible. At the airport, she paid for the use of a truck and set out for Goma in then-Zaire, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were also headed.

"I never saw anyone harmed," McCain recalls, "but I saw the bodies along the roadside."

She did set up her hospital:

The field hospital covered four acres. McCain's team provided primary care for the sick and frightened refugees, many of them suffering dehydration. For nearly a month, McCain organized food and water for the operation, collecting supplies at the Goma airport.

Now the opposition wants to portray her as just a rich lady with a lot of cars.

Cindy McCain recently returned to Rwanda, which has become far more peaceful, and whose citizens are reconciling. "The reason this will be a successful country," she says, "is the women -- some of the strongest, most inspiring women I have ever met."

Given her history of humanitarianism, these adjectives might be associated with McCain herself. The election of her husband would also bring to the White House an adventurous, traveled, intriguingly fearless first lady. Over the years, McCain has brought medical services to a Sandinista stronghold following Nicaragua's civil war; set up a mobile hospital near Kuwait City while the oil wells still burned from the first Gulf War; helped in Bangladesh following a cyclone. And while in that country in 1991, she found her daughter Bridget in an orphanage -- "She really picked me," McCain insists. Sometimes the desire to save every child is properly concentrated on a single child.

But too many on the left have little respect for people like Cindy McCain, people who actually do something, rather than meet in coffee houses to talk about it.  This doing something, it's an inconvenience, isn't it?  Can't the government do it?

Even if a first lady is not intrusively political, the whole White House responds to her priorities. Cindy McCain has had decades of personal contact with the suffering of the developing world. And in some future crisis or genocide, it might matter greatly to have a first lady who knows the smell of death.

That puts it bluntly, and correctly.  The alternative is Michelle Obama, who, according to a recent report on her visit to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, knows the smell of lobster. 

It is shameful to see what some in the press have tried to do to Cindy McCain.   But what goes around, comes around.

October 18, 2008.