Repeat after me:  Cindy Hensley McCain.  Say it again:  Cindy Hensley McCain.  I don’t know why but it sounds like Theresa Heinz Kerry to me. 

I like Theresa Heinz Kerry.  And I really like Heinz ketchup and I always wanted to write a piece about the 57 varieties of Heinz.  Remember when that used to be their slogan.  I always wondered what they were.   Relish? Pickles?  Baked Beans?  I wanted to have a barbecue and test them all. Were there really 57 or were there really more (or less) and they’d just gotten used to saying there were 57.

But I digress because the point is Theresa Heinz Kerry didn’t want to release her tax returns.  She filed separately from her husband John Kerry.  And at the time that he was running for President, she resisted making her tax returns public.  For a really long time.  In fact, she released her tax returns on October 16, 2004, less than three weeks before the election.  And we all know what happened to him. 

Repeat after me, Cindy Hensley McCain does not want to release her tax returns either. Her father James Hensley had a big bottling corp, the Hensley Corp that exclusively distributed Anheuser Busch, Budweiser, Michelob, many varieties of ale, and by all accounts left a small fortune.  And Cindy Hensley McCain has always filed separately from her husband John McCain and she doesn’t feel that she needs to release them, now. 

I could say a lot of things about this, the sheer arrogance of it, the notion that there are two sets of rules, one for everybody else who’s running for office and one for them, the idea that the first lady doesn’t have a public responsibility and that the citizens of this country don’t have the right to know, the idea that the McCains don’t have an obligation to make all of their investments public...I could go on and on... 

But I’d rather talk about the 57 varieties of Heinz.  They don’t use that any more.  Now, they just call themselves America’s favorite.  I wonder when they switched to that.

0 Comments