Remember this interview with Katie Couric? We were all so focused on McCain's inability to count property that a fairly large whopper of a lie went for the most part unnoticed:

Couric: Are you sorry about the way you answered the question about how many homes you own?

McCain: Well, I'll continue to say I'm blessed, and very proud, that Jim Hensley, a war hero, a man barely able to graduate from high school was able to pass on to his daughter a...what he had struggled for and saved for. That's the ambition all of us have for our children and our grandchildren. And if someone wants to disparage that, they're free to do that.

Yeah, Hensley was the Great American Success Story. Funny thing about that... while there are some serious lowlifes on the right willing to smear Obama by association with terrorism in ads funded by nebulous shadow groups (although it must hurt Simmons where he lives that his kid donated the max to Obama), I'd say that there is more than enough ammunition in this whitewashing of Jim Hensley's background to fill a few ads.

So it's natural to ask: how was the Hensley fortune built? According to a 2000 investigation in the Phoenix New Times,

The Hensley saga... swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze, gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime.

The story by investigative reporters Amy Silverman and John Dougherty is riveting - and remarkably untouched by the Corporate Media, even though it involves the car-bomb murder of a top reporter at the Arizona Republic named Don Bolles.

Jerome Corsi - a rightwinger who co-authored the infamous and election-changing Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry [and the recent Obama hit job Obamanation]- summarizes the Hensley saga and its extensive ties to the Mob...read on..

So Jim Hensley had dirty fingers in enough juicy pies of bootlegging, mafia, racketeering and even murder -- while being defended by future Supreme Court Chief William Rehnquist, mind you -- to even make a right wing hack like Corsi sit up and take notice? That's some good stuff the media is completely ignoring.

And for the record, McCain, that's not at all the kind of ambition I hope for my kids and grandkids.