At the very least, this is about the double standard for rich, well-connected white women

I wonder...if Michelle Obama had been addicted to painkillers and had stolen drugs from a charity, and committed fraud to get them....would the DEA have largely looked the other way? Would she have been able to cop a plea as a "first-time offender", enter treatment, and perform community service instead of going to jail for twenty years?

I think not.

Not only that, but the McCain campaign would be yowling 100 years to Sunday about her addiction and degeneracy.

But Michelle Obama has NOT been addicted to painkillers. Michelle Obama is a woman who is the product of a strong marriage and family, rather than of a philanderer and his trophy wife. Michelle Obama is a woman who attended and graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. She's a woman of supreme confidence, grace, intelligence and wit, whose husband treats her like an equal and revels in her achievements.

But Cindy McCain is blonde, and extremely wealthy, and knows that her place is to stand silently by with a frozen smile gazing adoringly at her husband, who is a United States Senator who is running for president and feeds barbecued ribs to the press. So when a whistleblower comes out about just how Cindy McCain got out of serving twenty years for fraudulently obtaining drugs, and John McCain (or one of his surrogates) orders the Washington Post to scrub the story from its web site, the paper obliges. After all, it isn't as though they can get barbecued ribs anywhere else, so they'd better fall in line.

But a newspaper in Everett, Washington isn't under the purview of WaPo, but obviously has some kind of distribution agreement with the Paper of Barbecued Ribs, so the article appears at HeraldNet instead.

The Phoenix NewTimes wrote about the case in 1994:

You're U.S. Senator John McCain, and you've got a big problem.
Your wife, Cindy, was addicted to prescription painkillers. She stole pills from a medical-aid charity she heads and she used the names of unsuspecting employees to get prescriptions.

The public is about to find out about it.
Until now, you've managed to keep it all quiet. When Tom Gosinski, a man your wife fired, sued for wrongful termination and threatened to expose the whole sordid story, you didn't hesitate to call in the big guns.

John Dowd, the attorney who got you out of your Keating Five mess, worked on getting your wife a sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors. He also made Gosinski's lawsuit go away.

He didn't stop there.
To help maintain your reputation and discredit your wife's accuser, Dowd called Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley and complained that Gosinski was trying to extort money. Romley, your Republican ally, promptly launched an extortion investigation.

But now New Times makes a public records request for documents in the extortion case. It's only a matter of days before the story gets out.

Here's what the senator does.
He calls in another big gun, political strategist Jay Smith, who conceives a rather remarkable plan.

On August 19--just three days before the records are to be made public--Smith parades your wife before a select group of journalist friends. She tells a tale of pain and triumph, and, incredibly, all the reporters agree to sit on the story until August 22. When Cindy McCain says her confession is intended to quell rumors and to inspire other druggies to turn their lives around, the journalists lap it up. They write about her "bravery." The first round of stories is one-sided. There is no mention of Tom Gosinski or Romley's extortion investigation.

Ariel Levy touched only briefly on the matter in an article in the September 15 New Yorker, in which he writes about the discrepancies between the official stories about how John and Cindy McCain met and about Cindy's drug addiction and the Gosinski matter, but instead of calling the McCains' lies what they are, Levy refers to their version of these stories and the truth as "leaving out a detail or two."

John McCain sponsored a bill on drug testing for major league sports, and has fully supported the so-called War on Drugs, but when it's his own wife, it looks like he goes so far as to call off the DEA. Because like all other laws in the eyes of Republicans, drug laws are also only for those without the resources to strongarm federal investigators into backing off.

UPDATE: Looks like WaPo didn't take into account its comment section when it scrubbed this story. It's back up -- AND linked from the home page.