First, an article about John McCain’s dumping his first wife, then a summary I’ve put together dealing with McCain’s family background and his father-in-law’s being an ex-con and mobster who grubstaked the young John McCain into politics:

The article is at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1024927/The-wife-John-McCain-callously-left-behind.html#
Its title is “The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind,” and it was published in the London) Daily Mail, by their investigative reporter Sharon Churcher, on 08th June 2008. Look at it; when I show it to my Republican friends, they turn away from McCain. But they really are repelled when they find out the broader context, which I summarize below. Note especially that McCain was grubstaked by mob money during his first political campaign:

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McCain wasn’t very intelligent (to put it mildly), and had graduated 894th in his class of 899 at the U.S. Naval Academy. If he had been the average Joe who had been admitted there, he couldn’t have gotten very far afterwards. However, his father was Admiral John McCain Jr., who just happened to be the commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater during 1968-72, immediately after John III was shot down. Admiral McCain ordered the bombing of Hanoi. John’s grandfather was Admiral John McCain Sr., who was the son of a Mississippi plantation owner, and the grandson of a Mississippi plantation owner who had owned 52 slaves. Great things were expected of this young military aristocrat, after his release from a prison in North Vietnam, where he had been tortured. In 1980, he married his second wife, Cindy, who was an extremely wealthy heiress. (On 8 June 2008, London’s Daily Mail headlined “The Wife U.S. Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind,” and explained why John McCain’s first wife, Carol, was silent about his having abandoned her after her car-crash and disabling injury: He had purchased her silence with Cindy’s ample cash. “Ross Perot, who paid her [Carol’s] medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel.” Perot was quoted there as saying of McCain: “After he came home [from Vietnam], Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona.” Veterans’ rights activist Ted Sampley was quoted there as saying, “I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is — deceit.”) Then, McCain quit the U.S. Navy the following year, as a captain, and his new wife Cindy set him up in business, as the Vice President of her father’s Arizona beer-distributorship, and almost immediately afterwards in Arizona politics. So, John McCain didn’t actually need to be intelligent, because he had lots of money, and lots of ready-made contacts.

All of the money, and most of the contacts, for McCain’s political career, came via the family into which he had married — a Mafia-connected family. Cindy’s father, James Hensley, was “Married to the Mob,” as Eli Blake blogged on 18 December 2006. A lengthy report on Jim Hensley’s background was done by C.D. Stelzer in the 11 June 1997 St. Louis Riverfront Times, under the headline, “Phoenix Rising: Twenty-one years after a car bomb killed journalist Don Bolles, doubts remain as to who was responsible for his murder.” One thing that seems clear is that Jim Hensley took the fall for his boss, the Arizona liquor distributor and former bookie Kemper Marley, who was an associate of Las Vegas gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Gus Greenbaum; and so Hensley went to prison, despite Hensley’s being represented in court by Marley’s personal attorney, William Rehnquist, the future U.S. Supreme Court Chief inJustice. When Hensley was released, Marley, by now Arizona’s wealthiest man, bought his friend’s silence by setting him up with an Anheuser-Busch distributorship, Hensley & Co. (So, if John McCain bought his former wife’s silence, then he might have had his father-in-law’s advice assisting him on it; Jim Hensley had learned about this from a pro.) The investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic Don Bolles was murdered by the Mafia in June 1976, while investigating Mafia control of Arizona, and Kemper Marley was widely suspected as being behind this hit. Bolles had discovered that Marley, the ex-con on the State Board Racing Commission, was still a close associate of Peter Licavoli, Arizona’s Mafia boss. And, “Marley had also served as Chairman of the Board for Valley National Bank, which helped bankroll Bugsy Siegel’s construction of the Flamingo in Las Vegas.” Hensley’s son-in-law decided to run for Congress in 1982, and so Hensley, and one of Hensley’s friends, Charles Keating of the Lincoln S&L, became the first major contributors to John McCain’s entry into “elective” politics. Lincoln S&L collapsed in April 1989, and was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers for $2 billion. Soon thereafter, McCain was one of “the Keating Five” Senators associated with this scandal, none of which Senators went to prison, however. McCain was merely criticized by the Senate Ethics Committee for “poor judgment,” — just one “poor judgment” in McCain’s Senate career full of them, and not even his worst (which concerned Iraq). Keating had contributed $112,000 to his friend’s political campaigns, and when asked whether his donations had bought him influence, blurted out “I certainly hope so.” Ted Sampley headlined in the January 1997 U.S. Veteran Dispatch, “Sen. McCain Wants to Be President: Check Out His Unpresidential Credentials,” and he quoted such sources as the 8 October 1989 Arizona Republic, which said: “While Sen. John McCain’s wife and father-in-law were investing with Charles H. Keating, Jr., in a shopping center, McCain was helping Keating battle federal regulators who questioned his operation of Lincoln Savings and Loan.”

During the 2008 U.S. Presidential contest, Barack Obama was smeared on the internet, and was accused in conservative “news” media, of having “mob” connections. Allegations were spread by supporters of Hillary Clinton and of John McCain, saying that Obama had associated with “gangsters,” especially with failed and recently convicted Chicago public-housing entrepreneur Antoine Rezko. However, neither Hillary’s campaign nor McCain’s campaign produced evidence of any wrongdoing by Senator Obama. Meanwhile, Senator McCain won his Party’s nomination, and he subsequently contested for the Presidency against Obama, with no mention being made anywhere in the press about McCain’s real mob connections, which had been central to McCain’s rise in politics, and which were far more extensively documented than the mere rumors that were being widely spread against Obama. The investigative reporter Don Bolles was murdered, and that’s the only serious investigative journalism that was connected in any way with any of the 2008 Presidential candidates. Similarly, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, good journalism hasn’t been rewarded, but has instead been severely punished, sometimes, like this, with death. That’s how conservatism functions everywhere: by means of force and deception.

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So, why isn’t moveon.org running TV commercials about THE REAL JOHN MCCAIN?