AP/Mary Altaffer

From Nice Polite Republicans:

Last Tuesday, NPR broadcast a story about Cindy McCain's business and charity work. In it, Ted Robbins described McCain as the only child of Jim Hensley, a wealthy Arizona businessman. The next morning, NPR received an e-mail from Nicholas Portalski of Phoenix, who heard the story with his mother.

"We were listening to the piece about Cindy McCain on NPR, All Things Considered, and it just struck us very hard," Portalski said.

His mother, Kathleen Hensley Portalski, is also Hensley's daughter.

So the media's favorite blonde isn't an only child after all?  Beer Heiress Barbie has a--GASP!--middle class half-sister? A half-sister who was effectively cut out of Daddy Beerbucks' will, to the sole benefit of Cindy? A half-sister, the existence of whom Cindy McCain has never publicly acknowledged?  Wait, wasn't this a story line from "All My Children"? 

And it's not as if Cindy McCain has actively disabused the media from labeling her as Jim Hensley's sole progeny:

McCain herself routinely uses the phrase "only child," as she did on CNN last month. "I grew up with my dad," she said then. "I'm an only child."

Hold onto your Stetsons, because the story turns eerily familiar:

Jim Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17, flying over Europe during World War II.

He was injured and sent to a facility in West Virginia to recuperate. During that time, while still married to Mary Jeanne, Hensley met another woman — Marguerite Smith. Jim divorced Mary Jeanne and married Marguerite in 1945.

How special is it that Cindy's daddy treated his first wife with the same courtesies that John McCain treated his.  Apples, acorns, trees.  With a father like that, it's no wonder that Cindy McCain hooked up with Ol' Mavericky.  Maybe Freud did have a point.

By the way, this story comes on the heels of the release of court documents on Saturday in which it was revealed that Roberta McCain, John McCain's media-beatified mother, sued McCain's first wife -- you know, the crippled one who raised his kids--for the return of some relatively innocuous trinkets that she had given to Carol McCain during her marriage to Roberta's sanctified son. 

And let's not forget Meghan McCain's upcoming children's book, just in time for the Republican National Convention, in which she neglects to mention her half-siblings from Daddy's first marriage.  I'm sensing a pattern here.

All that money and they can't even buy compassion.