Cindy McCain lied about Mother Teresa.

I thought the biggest whopper of the campaign season would have to be Hillary and the visit to Bosnia where she bravely endured non-existent sniper fire. But even Hillary stopped short of including Mother Teresa in her porkies.

Cindy McCain, it seems, simply couldn't help herself.

The story about Mother Teresa “convincing” Mrs. McCain to bring home two children from an orphanage in Bangladesh has been retold many times. Initially, the “About Cindy McCain” page on the McCain campaign website read: “Mother Teresa convinced Cindy to take two babies in need of medical attention to the United States. One of those babies is now their adopted daughter, 16-year-old Bridget McCain.”

The media picked up the theme. A story earlier this year on ABC’s “Good Morning America” stated, “With Mother Teresa’s encouragement she brought her fourth child, Bridget, home.” An April 2008 Wall Street Journal profile states that Mother Teresa “implored” Cindy to bring the girls to the United States. Other articles say Cindy did it “at the behest” of Mother Teresa.

But a source who was with McCain on that 1991 trip, and who asked that his name not be used because of prior legal dealings with the McCain family, says that Mother Teresa was not at the orphanage when Cindy decided to bring the two girls home.

A 1991 article in the Arizona Star at the time of the adoption only mentions that the children were from an orphanage that was started by Mother Teresa. It does not mention a meeting with Mother Teresa or her asking McCain to bring the girls to the US.

According to biographies of Mother Teresa, in 1991 she was in Mexico where she developed medical problems. From there, she went to a hospital in La Jolla, Calif.

A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where. The campaign has since reworded the reference to the adoption on its website.

When one couples this to McCain telling stories about soldiers making signs of the cross in the dirt in POW camps - which sound suspiciously like stories told by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - one gets the impression that the McCain's find good narrative far more important than truth.

I mean, you would know if Mother Teresa had asked you to adopt a baby wouldn't you? That's not the kind of thing one easily forgets.

In fact, the story has changed quite dramatically only fairly recently:

In 2004 it went like this:

Vanity Fair (November 2004, The Trashing of John McCain):

In 1991, when Cindy McCain was on a relief mission to Bangladesh, she was asked by one of Mother Teresa's nuns to help a young orphan with a cleft palate. Flying her to the U.S. for surgery, Cindy realized she couldn't give her up. At the Phoenix airport, she broke it to her husband, and they eventually adopted the child. But few people knew that story. In the words of McCain's national campaign manager, Rick Davis, a smear doesn't have "to be true to be effective."

However, by 2008, it had altered to quite a degree:

The Sunday Mail (Feb. 3, 2008, Dark past no barrier for Cindy):

"While working at Mother Teresa's orphanage in the early 1990s, I stumbled upon the most beautiful little girl I'd ever seen,'' she said. ``She had a terrible cleft palate. She had problems with her feet. She had problems with her hands. She had all kinds of problems.

"As only Mother Teresa can, she prevailed upon me to take this baby and another baby to the United States for medical care.''

So that's not a case of misremembering what happened. That's a decision to align yourself, and what was a very generous act, to Mother Teresa herself.

Rick Warren told Larry King that, when telling the story of Mother Teresa's role in his daughters adoption, McCain's eyes "teared up."

So, he can not only lie with utter ease, he can actually feign tears as he does so.

UPDATE:

Cenk sums this up beautifully. Cindy McCain did a wonderful thing. She took an orphan from Asia with a cleft palate and brought her to America and gave her a life style beyond any of our wildest dreams. There is no need to embellish such a tale, it's beautiful. But it's like the McCain's can't help themselves, they had to add Mother Teresa to the story.

As Cenk rightly points out, had Michelle Obama told a lie this outrageous, Obama's campaign would be finished. This is the largest, most cynical lie I have ever heard told during a presidential campaign.

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