You all have heard about the little old woman who lived in a shoe who had so many children she didn't know what to do. Well, John McCain has the opposite problem. That little old man has so many houses he doesn't know when his property taxes are due! By latest count McCain owns at least eleven, count 'em, eleven houses with his wife Cindy who has a little sibling problem. John McCain can't count all his houses; Cindy McCain can't count all her siblings.
There was an old woman
Who lived in a shoe;
She had so many children,
She didn't know what to do.
She gave them some broth,
Without any bread;
She whipped them all soundly,
And sent them to bed.
There was John McCain with his $520 Ferragamo shoes.
He had so many houses he didn't know when his property taxes were due.
His wife had so many siblings she forgot who was who.
So he fed the American people some gruel without any bread,
Whipped the whiners soundly
And sent them to bed.
Now who's the out of touch elitist? I guess the economy is going pretty good ... for the McCains. After all they spent over a quarter of a million dollars last year on household help. Jeez, if their taxes had been lower, they could have hired a few more servants. They would have been able to create more jobs as we know all rich people do if their taxes are low enough.
But then as if not being able to count all your houses isn't bad enough, Cindy McCain can't even couint all her siblings!
When Cindy McCain talks about growing up, she usually refers to herself as an "only child" -- a phrase that ignores the existence of her half sisters.
"It's terribly painful," Kathleen Hensley Portalski said yesterday. "It is as if she is the 'real' daughter. I am also a real daughter."
Portalski and McCain are both children of the late Jim Hensley, the Arizona businessman who founded one of the largest beer distributorships in the nation. Kathleen, 65, is the product of Hensley's first marriage in the 1930s to Mary Jeanne Parks. Hensley divorced Parks for Marguerite "Smitty" Johnson, whom he met at a West Virginia hospital in World War II and married in 1945. Cindy was born nine years later.
The half sisters had little contact growing up and have not spoken since Hensley's funeral in 2000. In his will, he left just $10,000 to his older daughter; Cindy inherited her father's multimillion-dollar fortune.
Portalski told our colleague Kimberly Kindy that she stood quietly by for decades while her father lavished attention on his second family. But the past few months -- with Cindy McCain's glowing childhood memories and repeated references to being her father's only child -- finally became too much. "I was his family, too," she said from her home in Phoenix. "I saw him at Christmas and I spent my birthdays with him."
But there's more: Cindy McCain has another half sister. Before her marriage to Hensley, Johnson had a daughter, Dixie Burd, by a previous relationship. Burd, who is much older than Cindy, could not be reached for comment.
The McCain campaign has been tight-lipped about the expanded family tree: "Mrs. McCain was raised as the only child of Jim and Marguerite Hensley, and there was no familiar relationship with any other sibling," it said in a statement.
The messy saga went public after McCain talked about her childhood in an NPR interview. Portalski's son, Nicholas, contacted the network to clarify the family history and his mother's feelings about being overlooked. "I'm upset," she told NPR. "I'm angry. It makes me feel like a nonperson, kind of."
Money, of course, has exacerbated the family tensions. The multimillionaire Hensley only occasionally saw his older daughter -- and was emotionally distant when he did, according to her son -- but gave Portalski and her children money and college tuition. But when he died eight years ago, Hensley bequeathed Cindy the majority share of his company. (Andrew McCain, John's son from his first marriage, is now the chief financial officer.) Portalski got no share of the business, and support to her family was abruptly cut off.
"It doesn't make any kind of sense at all,'' Portalski said yesterday. "He was generous over the years when I was growing up, so it doesn't compute that he would do that; that he would leave all of us out. He paid for college for two of my kids. He gave us yearly gifts that were generous, allowed for a down payment on a home. I felt shock and disbelief. I just wish I could ask him, 'Why?' "
Her son, Nicholas, asked for a copy of the will and said it had been amended so many times that it was hard to tell what the original intent or language must have been.
Now, she said, all she wants is for the McCains to apologize and acknowledge her branch of the family tree. (Since you asked: Yes, they're Democrats.) "He was my father, too. I don't know why even now he cannot be a part of my life."
Memo to Cindy: Couldn't you at least give Nicholas Portalski, your nephew, a job driving a beer truck? After all that's what the family business consists of: beer distribution. You truck beer around the state of Arizona. That's how your father, Jim Hensley, made his millions.
But speaking of Jim Hensley, he was convicted in 1948 of liquor law violations.
The criminal convictions had little immediate impact on the brothers' fortunes.
James Hensley profited handsomely from his association with liquor magnate Kemper Marley, a man police suspect ordered the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who had written about Marley's business and political dealings. The man convicted of placing a bomb beneath Bolles' car testified that Marley also wanted former Arizona governor and then-attorney general Bruce Babbitt murdered because Babbitt had filed an antitrust lawsuit against the liquor industry in 1975. (Marley, who died in 1990, was never charged in the Bolles case. Babbitt is now U.S. Secretary of the Interior.)
By 1955, James Hensley had launched a Budweiser distributorship in Phoenix, a franchise reportedly bestowed upon him by Marley, who was never indicted in the 1948 federal liquor-law-violation case -- or a subsequent one -- despite his controlling financial role in the liquor distribution businesses.
James Hensley's conviction didn't deter the State of Arizona from granting him a wholesale liquor license in the mid-1950s. The Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control turned a blind eye to repeated liquor-law violations at the company. State liquor regulators did nothing when James Hensley failed to disclose his federal felony conviction on a sworn 1988 disclosure statement to the department and the City of Phoenix.
Today, Phoenix-based Hensley & Company is the nation's fifth-largest beer wholesaler -- a privately held business that 80-year-old James Hensley still controls. He built the Budweiser distributorship into at least a $200 million-a-year business, with annual sales of more than 20 million cases of beer.
Not quite the American Dream story that has been portrayed for James Hensley: "returning veteran starts business, makes fortune." Yeah, by associating with the mob.
But be that as it may. Cindy's father came home from WWII and divorced his first wife, Kathleen's mother, in order to marry Cindy's mother. John McCain came home from the Vietnam war, divorced his first wife in order to marry Cindy. Is that history repeating itself or what? McCain callously left behind his first wife, Carol, after she became disfigured in an auto accident. After Carol had done all she could to get McCain released from the Hanoi Hilton, McCain ditched her when he finally came home and found that she had gained weight and walked with a limp. He ran around with other women and finally settled on the beautiful and rich Cindy. He married Cindy a month after getting a divorce from Carol.
McCain had less than a distinguished record at Annapolis graduating almost last in his class. His class rank was 894 out of 899. But then he described himself as being "dumber then Bush" a difficult feat to accomplish. Then he went on to lose five aircraft before he landed up in the Hanoi Hilton. And this is what you call a distinguished military career? The Red Baron, he ain't. But I guess graduating almost last in your class qualifies you to be President of the United States. Along with those other stellar intellects Ronald Reagan, Pappy Bush and George W Bush, McCain would be in the tradition of a long line of Numbskull Republican American Presidents.
I hope that Joe Biden will point out that almost every McCain utterance contains the words "My friends," a noun, a verb and "prisoner of war." Did McCain actually accomplish anything in Vietnam other than getting shot down and losing millions of dollars' worth of US aircraft? The answer is not much. Some war hero. And then there's the questionable "cross in the sand" story.
But you would have thought that, after he got home, McCain would have been a champion of the POW/MIA cause and a champion of all veterans returning from Iraq. Sadly this was and is not the case.
According to Mrs.Carol Hrdlicka, when POW/MIA family members confronted Sen. John McCain in the halls of Congress after the conclusion of the Committee’s Report, he shoved the wheelchair of handicapped POW mother Jane Gaylord out of his way knocking it into her niece who was behind the chair attending to her aunt and she was pushed up against a wall. Subsequently Mrs. Gaylord filed a complaint for assault against the Senator but the matter was squelched by the powers that be. As Senator McCain attempted to jump on an elevator to make a quick escape from the POW/MIA family members gathered, he shouted at Mrs. Hrdlicka, “You don’t know what I’ve been through”(indicating he was a former POW and inferring Mrs. Hrdlicka had no comparable experience or appreciation of his great suffering and sacrifice). As the door to the elevator began to close around the cowering Senator who was making good his get-a-way, Mrs. Hrdlicka raised a large photo of her POW husband Col. David Hrdlicka and thrust it at the elevator doors to show the Senator that she did indeed share in the suffering of POWs and family members and shouted that she had clear proof her husband David was still alive in captivity. Unfortunately, Mrs. Hrdlicka’s cries and pleas for help from government officials bent on closing the chapter on POWs fell on deaf ears and blackened hearts!
You know, but there is no group McCain will not pander to. He even offered up Cindy to be in the Miss Buffalo Chip contest at Sturgis which involves women performing simulated sex acts! Then there's his famous temper even telling a fellow senator "F**k you", and the Keating Five ethics scandal.
And then there's the $520 Ferragamo shoes.
Ah yes, the economy is fundamentally sound ... for John McCain.
