It may just be my imagination, but reading the
NY Times story about Cindy McCain's non-visit to Rwanda reminded me of Sarah Palin's non-visit to Iraq.
From the Cindy McCain story:
Similarly, Mrs. McCain often mentions her travels to Rwanda at the height of the 1994 genocide — she wrote about it in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece and has been praised by politicians and newspaper columnists for jetting into the heart of a massacre. As with her other charity trips, participants praised her eagerness to help victims of tragedy. But news accounts and interviews indicate, and a campaign spokesman confirmed, that Mrs. McCain traveled after the genocide had ended, spending time with refugees in neighboring Zaire, now Congo. Asked if she was ever in Rwanda, as Mrs. McCain has stated many times, a campaign spokesman, Jill Hazelbaker, said “she was driven to the Zaire/Rwanda border in order to assess the conditions of the refugees entering the country.”
For those of you who may have forgotten, shortly after McCain picked Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate, the campaign reported that among Palin's few trips outside the United States was one to Iraq.
The Washington Post, among others, reported:
Palin made an official visit to see Alaskan troops in Kuwait in July of 2007. There, she made a stop at a border crossing with Iraq on July 25, according to the Boston Globe, but did not go further into the country. "Sarah Palin's visit to Iraq in 2007 consisted of a brief stop at a border crossing between Iraq and Kuwait, the vice presidential candidate's campaign said yesterday, in the second official revision of her only trip outside North America," the Globe's Bryan Bender wrote, adding, later in his story: "[C]ampaign aides and National Guard officials in Alaska said by telephone yesterday that she did not venture beyond the Kuwait-Iraq border."
Of course there have always been lying politicians. For reasons yet to be determined, in the 2008 campaign, those on the presidential level seem to be tied closely to Senator John McCain.
