A 1991 article in the Arizona Star at the time of the adoption only mentions that the children were from an orphanage that was started by Mother Teresa. It does not mention a meeting with Mother Teresa or her asking McCain to bring the girls to the US.

This is the pattern:

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. It's especially important to add these embellishments when your goal is to appeal to a fundamentalist base, when your own prickly, personal and private faith isn't very marketable. And when your adopted daughter is Bangladeshi, and when that fact has been disgracefully used against you by the Bush machine in 2000, and when some fringes of your base get queasy about multi-racial families, what better way to describe the adoption than as something Mother Teresa herself "implored" you to do? More interesting: the first actual reports of this event do not mention this fact. They are added later.

I note that this false story was on the McCain website and has since been corrected. Now, the question is whether and when Cindy McCain met with Mother Teresa:

A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where. The campaign has since reworded the reference to the adoption on its website.

Can we nail down the date of that meeting? Or are these questions no one should dare ask of a POW war hero?

(Photo: Doug Collier/Getty.)



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