Cindy McCain harshly criticized Myanmar's military junta Thursday while vowing to make improving human rights there a priority if she becomes America's next first lady.
Taking a cue from current first lady Laura Bush, who has also been a sharp critic of human rights abuses in Myanmar, the wife of presumed Republican presidential nominee John McCain said Myanmar leaders don't value human life.
"It's just a terrible group of people that rule the country, and the frightening part is that their own people are dying of disease and starvation and everything else and it doesn't matter," Cindy McCain said during a trip to Vietnam, where she has worked with a charity that helps children born with facial deformities. "I don't understand how human life doesn't matter to somebody. But clearly, it doesn't matter to them."
While the leaders of Myanmar certainly deserve to go to hell, human rights abuses have also occurred in the United States. The case can easily be made that George Bush doesn't value human life - certainly not the lives of the detainees at Guantanamo. If John McCain is elected, will Cindy pressure Congress to have George Bush tried for his crimes?
Separately, Cindy McCain said the stir she caused in the presidential race earlier this year when she took exception to a comment by the wife of her husband's Democratic rival, Barack Obama, was unplanned and not a political ploy.
After Michelle Obama said in February that for the first time in her adult life she was proud of the United States, Cindy McCain pointedly said: "I have, and always will be, proud of my country."
Why are people of color always questioned when they point out the United State's many abuses, and say they aren't always proud of their country?
If Cindy McCain is proud of the United States and ready to discount the US' many abuses of human rights, she is guilty of idolatry.
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