Vetting the First Ladies
Moving on to Harvard Law School, she received her Juris Doctorate in 1988 and returned to Chicago. She joined the Sidley Austin law firm where, as part of her responsibilities, she was assigned to mentor a summer intern named Barack Hussein Obama, then a student at Harvard Law School.
After leaving the practice of law, she worked in Chicago city government, run by what has long been the most corrupt big-city Democratic machine in the country. She served as an assistant to Mayor Richard M. Daley and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development.
In 1996, after working three years for a non-profit called Public Allies, and four years after marrying Barack Obama, she joined the University of Chicago as Associate Dean of Student Services, playing a major role in developing the university’s Community Service Center. In 2002 she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as Executive Director of Community Affairs and later as Vice President for External Affairs.
When it comes to “bringing home the bacon,” Hillary Clinton was a piker compared to Michelle Obama. When Bill Clinton became Governor of Arkansas the general counsel for Tyson’s Foods, the state’s largest employer, mentored Hillary in a cattle futures trading venture. Mrs. Clinton opened an account with $1,000, and over the next ten months she turned that modest sum into a $100,000 nest egg...selling short in a bull market.
When Michelle Obama was promoted from executive director to vice president in 2005 she received an annual pay increase of $195,050, from $121,910 to $316,960...just three months after her husband was sworn in as the junior senator from Illinois.
This, of course, is a young black woman who not only enjoys a million dollar annual income, who lives in a multi-million dollar home in Chicago, who attended the most expensive Ivy League schools, all on someone else’s dollar, and who now concludes, according to a March 2008 interview in The New Yorker magazine that “...in America, in 2008, we’re a country that is just downright mean, we are guided by fear...”
Cindy Hensley McCain was born in Phoenix, Arizona in May 1954. She attended the University of Southern California where she earned a B.A. in Education and an M.A. in Special Education.
After graduation she worked for ten years as a special education teacher, working with children afflicted with Down syndrome. However, having witnessed the substandard medical facilities on Truk Lagoon in the Pacific in 1984, she used part of her family’s substantial wealth in 1988 to found the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT), a non-profit organization that sponsored trips for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel to Third World countries. AVMT provided emergency medical care for disaster-stricken and war-torn countries such as Bangladesh, India, El Salvador, Iraq, Kuwait, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Between 1988 and 1995, Mrs. McCain personally led fifty-five such missions.
While leading an AVMT mission at Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh in 1991, in the aftermath of that country’s devastating cyclone, she found two infant girls who needed medical care that could only be provided in the United States. The girls were brought to the United States and the McCains subsequently adopted one of the girls, their fourth child, whom they named Bridget. They then coordinated the adoption of the other child by a family friend. In 1989, following two spinal surgeries for ruptured discs, Cindy McCain became addicted to painkillers. And when her addiction was such that she was taking as many as twenty tablets a day, her parents staged an intervention. She entered a drug treatment facility and later received outpatient treatment. Her addiction lasted three years. Finally, in 1993, a hysterectomy brought an end to her chronic back pain.
In 2001, Mrs. McCain became active in Operation Smile, an organization that provides free surgery for children born with cleft lip and palate, taking teams of surgeons and other medical personnel to Morocco, Vietnam, and India.
In addition to serving as Chairman of Hensley & Company, one of the nation’s largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributorships, she serves on the board of directors of Operation Smile, CARE, the HALO Trust, and several other charitable organizations. She has also participated in operations to locate and remove landmines in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, and Angola.
In November, the people will decide which of these two women will enter the White House as First Lady. Who will it be...the hate-filled, “ineradicably racist” Michelle Obama, who has been given educational and job opportunities that are available to few poor and middle class white people, but who continues to see whites as her enemy? Will it be the Michelle Obama who wrote in her Princeton senior thesis that she will utilize all of her present and future resources to benefit the black community, first and foremost? Or will it be Cindy McCain, the classy lady from Arizona who spends so much of her time and resources serving mankind around the world...totally without regard for the color of their skin? |
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| Paul R. Hollrah is a freelance writer. He is a member of the Civil Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni at the University of Missouri - Columbia and a Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute. He currently resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma. |
