Free Republic

Let’s harken back to 2008 to cover some important background intelligence about Sen. John McCain who has been lashing out at President Trump and others from his apparent deathbed. McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children. But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about,...

My father, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, has been in politics as long as I can remember. And as long as I can remember, media coverage about him has contained misstatements of facts. The vast majority are simple mistakes that are easily corrected, understood and rewoven into an ongoing storyline. But one of them seems to have taken on a life of its own, and simple corrections have not sufficed to set the record straight. Why does this happen? I can't be sure, but I suspect that the narrative created by these untruths proves to be so much...

IT HAS been one of the best-kept secrets of the presidential election campaign. Julia Thorne, the first wife of John Kerry, the Democrat candidate, has been suffering from cancer.After months of treatment out of the public eye, she has now been declared cancer-free and has returned to her home in Montana. Thorne is considering writing a book about her experience of illness, but not until after the November election. “She is somebody who has written books before and has a lot to share with people,” a family friend said. If the past is a guide, she may include some acerbic...

After Newt Gingrich hit the national spotlight in 1994 by becoming the first Republican speaker of the House in 40 years, he was skewered by reports that he had served his first wife divorce papers as she lay in a hospital bed battling cancer. But the press has been far kinder to Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry, who, according to published accounts going back more than a decade, began extricating himself from his first marriage to Philadelphia heiress Julia Thorne at the same time she was battling a case of depression so debilitating that it drove her to the brink...