Has John McCain Stopped Abusing His Wife?

Here's something very, very strange. Over on the Huffington Post is a piece about a Baptist Minister, Marty Parrish, who stood up at a 'town hall' meeting and asked McCain whether he had actually called his wife a 'c**t' as alleged in Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain. Schecter alleges that in 1992, McCain angrily called his wife a "trollop" and a "c**t" in front of aides and reporters. The quote from Schecter's book, which is to be released next month, can be seen on The Raw Story e-zine and goes like this:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

In the book, Schecter is making the case that McCain has a really, really bad temper - an anger management problem, you might say - and that voters would be unwise to put such an unstable personality into the Oval Office.

If this is true, I'd be just as worried about what it says about McCain's attitude to women as I would be about his twitchy finger on the nuclear button. Women who wear makeup are 'trollops' it seems. His own wife is a 'c**t' in his eyes, it seems. (Does that go for Palin, too?) Sounds more like the Taliban than an American politician.

If you're of the Chistian loony persuasion yourself, you might like to wonder what the wedding vows mean to a man who would humiliate his wife in public like that (love? honour? cherish?) or how much charity there is in a man who is well-known for this kind of vitriolic, bullying outburst against subordinates. And, of course, there is the question: if he's like this in public, what's he like in private?

According to Parrish, it is such questions about McCain's mental stability and character that prompted him to stand up and ask the question that no newspaper or TV channel dare ask. I'm sure the McCain publicity machine (as vicious and cynical a group of people as I have ever come across) will paint this gutsy Baptist Minister as a deranged trouble-maker. For all I know, he is. But why is nobody else asking the question? What has happened to the American media during this campaign?