John McCain's Moral Clarity

John McCain was stumping in North Carolina this weekend trolling for Christian votes with his visit to Billy and Franklin Graham, seeking their blessing so to speak.

McCain, who is actively courting religious voters and trying to reassure skeptical conservatives, visited privately with the Grahams on the grounds of his retreat, known as Little Piney Cove, in Montreat.

Well, his voodoo must have been working because Graham the younger had this to say:

“I was impressed by his personal faith and his moral clarity on important social issues facing America today.”

I guess Franklin Graham must have missed the part where John McCain divorced his first wife because she had been badly disfigured in a tragic automobile accident.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5 ft. 4 in. and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

Moral clarity my ass.