McCain’s POW story is stolen material…
During last weekend’s Saddleback Forum between Barack Obama and John McCain, many people witnessed a profound difference between the two Presidental canidates. I found in interesting that Obama focused on giving actual answers to each question while McCain decided to tell stories to avoid giving real answers. Turns out that one of the stories that McCain spun during the forum was not his own, but was a blatant plagairism of someone else’s printed material. McCain’s ‘cross in the dirt’ story might sound very familiar to those who have read the stories of about Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his times in the Soviet Gulags. See if this account sounds familiar:
Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.
On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.
Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.
As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.
Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.
[From Luke Veronis, “The Sign of the Cross”; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]
Then last weekend, John McCain tells the story like this at the Saddleback Forum:
The following Christmas, because it was Christmas day, we were allowed to stand outside of our cell for a few minutes. In those days we were not allowed to see or communicate with each other, although we certainly did. And I was standing outside, for my few minutes outside at my cell. He came walking up. He stood there for a minute, and with his sandal on the dirt in the courtyard, he drew a cross and he stood there. And a minute later, he rubbed it out, and walked away.
For a minute there, there was just two Christians worshipping together. IÂ’ll never forget that moment.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds a little too close for comfort. Did both men experience the exact same compassionate moment with their captors? Highly unlikely, especially when you look deeper into the history of McCain’s telling of this story. When looking into this detail it’s found that prior to 1999, McCain never told anyone about this cross story, not even when he published books about his POW experience. McCain only started to mention this heartbreaking Christian story in 1999/2000 when… you guessed it, when he made his first run for President during the primaries against George W. Bush.
Now, combine this with a NY Sun article that McCain wrote in which the Arizona Senator admits to be a fan of Solzhenitsyn’s work, and the evidence is too much to ignore. McCain’s own admission that he has read Solzhenitsyn’s work and the fact that he never mentioned this story prior to 1999 (where as Solzhenitsyn’s book “The Gulag Archipelago” first published in 1973) is enough to accuse the GOP Nominee of trying to sell the people a fraudulent story, one that was stolen from the actual person who lived it. I don’t know about you… but that’s pretty low but it wasn’t McCain’s lowest point of the Saddleback Forum.
There is a report from the New York Times that states McCain was never in a ‘Cone of SilenceÂ’ during Barack’s interview, and didn’t arrive to the church for his own interview until his opponent’s interview was more than half over. According to his own staff, McCain was in the motorcade and running late getting to the event and never entered the silent area which was made to make the even fair until it was far too late. So want to know why McCain was so quick and forceful to answer his qustions during his interview? Simple really… he obviously listened to Obama’s interview while on his way to the event since the event was being broadcast on ever news channel and radio.
In other words… he cheated.
He was supposed have no prior knowledge of the questions being asked, but you can clearly tell by how he conducted himself that he did and gave the right ‘stump’ answers. Clearly the behavior of someone who knew what was coming, McCain has given us all an idea of what kind of canidate he’s going to be from here to November… just another sneaky Republican that will lie and cheat to get what he wants.
I don’t know about you, but this is a clear dent in McCain’s character if he can’t be trusted to follow the rules of a simple forum… or to even show up for an event on time. We can’t even trust him to be honest when telling stories about his POW days in Vietnam without stealing material from nobel prize winning authors. Is this blatant dishonesty, and lack of morals the kind qualities one would want in a President?
Something to think about when you hit the polls later this year my readers.
Peter
I’m sure the “pro-Obama” media won’t make a big deal out of this. But it is typical GOP stuff. Getting specific doesn’t poll well.
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Ralph Nader often tells the story of how his father would ask him and his brothers when they came home from school, he’d ask them if they’d spent the day learning how to think or learning how to feel. I’ve always been struck by that observation. Ultimately, it explains why the two major parties tend to produce candidates that campaign in such different ways.
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Popeye: I realize McCain is an ‘old school’ politican living in the you tube 21st Century. Yet he’s got to wise up and quickly learn quickly that everything he says can and will be immediately checked and verified. So he better watch his words cause the lies that he spat out to pander to people will be caught and called on front and center during this campaign…
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The problem, Peter, is that the media is so cowed by accusations of Obamaphilia that they’ve regularly given him a free pass on crap like this. I also think they’re treating his gaffes with kid gloves because they don’t want to be accused of ageism. I don’t care if he’s 7 or 70, if he doesn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, how can he come up with a coherent Iraq policy? The answer
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of course is that he never has. But he’s a WAR HERO so he gets a free pass for just about everything.
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Is it possible that the person who did this cross in the dirt thing for McCain had read Solzhenitsyn’s book and decided to do the same thing under similar circumstances? I don’t have the slightest idea what year Solzhenitsyn wrote this account, but if it was before McCain’s experience isn’t it possible, even probable that someone would have read Solzhenitsyn and done the same thing?
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NL: Sorry bub, I don’t think that’s even remotely possible. I think odds of McCain being a liar are more resonable than his captor reading a specific book and then doing the same thing. Nice grasping at straws there, but when making a bet… the safe one would be to admit that Politicans lie.
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Why do you think that my suggestion isn’t remotely possible? Solzhenitsyn wrote several books in the early 60’s about life in the Soviet Gulag. Are you telling me it isn’t possible that an American POW could have read one of Solzhenitsyn’s books, remembered the passage you cited and used it for his own purposes in a Communist POW camp? You’re the one grasping at straws here, looking to accuse a political enemy of lying without having any proof. If the passage you cite was written after 1973, or whatever year McCain was referring to, then fine you have something. But you don’t even have the year in which Solzhenitsyn wrote that passage, how can you accuse someone of lying if you don’t even know the facts of what you’re accusing him of lying about? I don’t like defending McCain but if you’re going to call someone a liar you need to know more than he has a story similar to something a Russian author wrote about the gulag.
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NL: I made it quite clear, the material in question titled “The Gulag Archipelago” first was published in 1973, meaning John McCain’s captor had zero chance to read it since Alexander Solzhenitsyn was still writing it when McCain was a POW. The book wasn’t even allowed to be published in Asia/Russia until 1989, so this guns down a lot of excuses you’ve been trying to toss around about the reading habits of McCain’s captors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago http://www.slate.com/id/2196613/ This pushes us towards a more simple explaination: John McCain is a liar.
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Here’s your problem. First of all, McCain may have never read this book or any passage from it. All this incident requires is some other POW reading the book, which is possible. Furthermore, you also jump to the conclusion that because the stories are similar, McCain must have ripped off the story and thus he must be lying. But the fact is, in Vietnam POW camps there were all sorts of little rebellious displays from the prisoners. The Communists were atheists, they refused to allow open displays of religion. Is it so far fetched that a Christian might draw a cross in the dirt as an act of rebellion on Christmas? That’s not exactly far fetched, in fact it’s more likely than not. Look, McCain may very well be lying but I don’t think you have proof enough to call him a liar.
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NL: Before you run off on your tangents, you might want to take a gander at the links provided in the entry. I put them in there for a reason. The NY Sun article written by McCain himself disproves your last statement. McCain in this article specifically speaks about “The Gulag Archipelago”, so it proves he did indeed read it: http://www.nysun.com/opinion/solzhenitsyn-at-work/83117/ That’s the proof that he read the material in question. So that can be considered evidence he did rip off the story.
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Again, Peter, you can’t prove that he ripped anything off. All you can do is show that he has similar stories. It isn’t implausible that in an act of defiance against the Communists that an American POW would draw a cross in the dirt on Christmas. Maybe McCain ripped the story off but you can’t prove that he did. If you’re going to call someone a liar, you need to have real proof and you just don’t have it. Believe me, I would love to be able to call McCain a liar but before I’m going to call him a liar I’m going to have proof that he lied.
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NL: This is the internet, not a court of law. It’s far too much of a coincedence that he would post articles about the book in question and then quote it as his own life story a few years later. That’s more than enough evidence to call bullsh!t on a sleezy politican trying to pander false POW stories for votes, and the fact that he never publically spoke or wrote about this story prior to 1999 is also very, very suspicious. I think it’s fair to say the more obvious explaination is that McCain is caught in a lie. It’s the simple truth… and that’s far more simple than your far fetched ideas.
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N Hussein Liberal can claim all day long that he doesn’t like McCain, but i’ve never seen him give a Democrat this much benefit of the doubt.
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yeah, i dont see how mccains experience is remotely a good thing, when he’s a politician, it just means he has had more experience learning how to lie better…
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Smoke and mirrors to mask that Obama looked lost on Saturday night. He will run from actual debates as fast as his skinny legs will take him.
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SK: That’s funny, cause I actually thought Obama looked more honest and compassionate during the forum than McCain did. He gave real answers as opposed to stump speeches, which is all McCain seemed to have. That and his false POW stories…
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