walking the talk

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here – what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Barack Obama
Campaign Speech in Berlin, Germany
July 24, 2008


Yes, Barack, "we" will. Or, better yet, some already have. For instance, your rival in the run for the Presidency, John McCain. Mr McCain has 7 children, 3 of them adopted: Doug and Andy are the two children that he adopted when he married their mother, Carol - his first wife. He and Carol then had Sidney. After his divorce from Carol, he and second wife, Cindy, adopted Bridget from Mother Teresa’s orphange in Bangladesh. He and Cindy are the biological parents of Meghan, Jack and Jimmy. Pretty words are nice, but what have you done, personally, to back them up?

John and Cindy McCain adopted Bridget McCain... From Bangladesh.


Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., talks on the cell phone in his hotel room on election night in Nashua, N.H., Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008. At right are his daughters Bridget and Meghan McCain.

In 1991, John and Cindy McCain adopted a beautiful young girl from Bangladesh.
The Wall Street Journal reported:

Cindy McCain visited Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she saw 160 newborn girls who had been abandoned. The nuns handed her a small baby with a cleft palate so severe that she couldn’t be fed. Another baby, also just a few weeks old, had a heart defect. Worried they would die without medical attention, Cindy applied for medical visas to take the girls back to the United States. But the country’s minister of health refused to sign the papers. “We can do surgery on this child,” an official told her. Cindy, frustrated, slammed her fist on the table. “Then do it! What are you waiting for?” The official, stunned, simply signed the papers. “I don’t know where I got the nerve,” Cindy said.

When she arrived in Phoenix, she carried the baby with the cleft palate off the plane. Her husband met her at the airport. He looked at the baby. “Where is she going,” he asked her. “To our house,” she replied. They adopted the little girl and named her Bridget. The second infant Mrs. McCain brought back ended up being adopted by a young McCain aide and his wife.

"We were called at midnight by Cindy," Wes Gullett remembers, and "five days later we met our new daughter Nicki at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport." Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. Mr. Gullett told me, "I never saw a hospital bill" for her care.

Video of Meghan McCain telling about Bridget McCain