Candidates, Bush to meet over economic crisis

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Honorable?
I supported John McCain in 2000. In my opinion, what George W. Bush did to him in the Carolinas was despicable, and made it impossible for me to ever vote for Bush. In my view, the presidential elections are entirely about the characters of the candidates. Times change so policies change, but I believe a person's character, a person's core, is immutable. The facts about John McCain's youth, that he goofed off in school, coming in 5th from the bottom of the 899 cadets in his class, that he got into and through Annapolis through his Admiral father's influence, that he was captured and imprisoned in Viet Nam, that in his old age he says he can't remember how many houses he owns or how much money he has, I take all these with a grain of salt. The young often grow out of their foolishness and perform a brave act, and the old sometimes forget.
I just can't bring myself to vote for someone I now know to be an adulterer.
This year I learned that John McCain met Carol Shepp, a swimsuit model from Philadelphia, in 1964. They married in '65 and had a daughter. While John was imprisoned in Nam, Carol was in an accident that ruptured her spleen, broke her arm and her hip, and crushed both her legs, leaving her six months in the hospital. Two more years and 23 operations left Carol four inches shorter than when she'd first met John. When John was released from Nam, he told friends she was "…not the woman I married." His POW status allowed him to strike up a friendship with the Reagans. While Carol worked in Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign, John had extramarital affairs. In 1979, a 42 year old John chased a 24 year old beer distributor heiress, Cindy Lou Hensley, around a buffet table set up to honor veterans, and had a relationship. Months later John shocked Carol and the Reagans with his divorce demand. I have yet to hear that the Reagans forgave him.
Now John has admitted his sin and I can forgive, as Jesus would have me do. But then, it's not hard to forgive a man for breaking his solemn promise to someone else. And if he and Carol had agreed to a divorce, releasing each other from their vows, before he started having affairs, I could forget. But John couldn't wait. And now he proposes to share the Oval Office with a former beauty pageant "Miss Congeniality". What I can't do is ever trust a man who breaks the most sacred oath a person ever takes, "…to love and to cherish…in sickness and in health…till death do us part."
I suppose there are those who would see nothing wrong with doing what John did and would find some way to defend it, but I believe that to keep our sacred oaths against the pull of animal instinct is where true courage and true character are found.
How can he ever be trusted to keep any promise he makes about judges or the unborn or anything else, if he can't keep the most sacred one?

— Gary AndrewS, author of "No Gods Before Me"

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