Emperor Palpatine weighed in on the ‘08 race on Wednesday by giving “young” Jedi McCain some unsolicited advice from the bleachers. Rove said he thinks that the usually secretive McCain needs to open up a bit more about his private life if he wants the voting public to relate to him better. There were two specific areas of McCain’s private life that he thinks should be highlighted with increased enthusiasm:

1999 picture. Which one of these is not like the others?

“Private people like Mr. McCain are rare in politics for a reason,” Rove writes. “Candidates who are uncomfortable sharing their interior lives limit their appeal. But if Mr. McCain is to win the election this fall, he has to open up.”

Specifically, Rove says McCain should reveal more about his wartime heroics and days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He also says McCain should spend more time highlighting the fact he and his wife took in a sick Bangladeshi child in 1991, their adopted daughter Bridget. [Link]

Here is the meat without the fat: Rove thinks McCain should go into details about which “stress positions” were used on him during his seven year stint in a North Vietnamese prison because American voters like macho men (e.g., Jack Bauer), and he should show that he is a compassionate conservative by pointing out with greater frequency that he took in a young brown girl from the third world. This is the same brown girl who was at the center of a whisper campaign orchestrated by Rove “unknown Bush operatives” in 2000, which implied she was McCain’s black lovechild (blogged about at SM 4 years ago). This hurt him in the South Carolina primary which he eventually lost to Bush.

… in 1991 Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands. The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life, so Mrs. McCain brought the child home to America with her. She was met at the airport by her husband, who asked what all this was about.

Mrs. McCain replied that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation. “I hope she can stay with us,” she told her husband. Mr. McCain agreed. Today that child is their teenage daughter Bridget.

I was aware of this story. What I did not know, and what I learned from Doris, is that there was a second infant Mrs. McCain brought back. She ended up being adopted by a young McCain aide and his wife.

“We were called at midnight by Cindy,” Wes Gullett remembers, and “five days later we met our new daughter Nicki at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport.” Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. Mr. Gullett told me, “I never saw a hospital bill” for her care. [Link]

Yeah, I’ll bet Rove was “aware of this story.” Years later, Bridget, just like Kanye West, wondered why George W. Bush hated her. I call bullshit on the Emperor and his mis-use of The Force for his continued use of Bridget for poltical gain.