You mean like John Kerry’s ‘Christmas in Cambodia’? The nonexistent event that was ‘seared’ into his memory?
Exactly like that. Funny how you guys have different standards for McCain.
ETA, I think Kerry just conflated Christmas with Tet in his memory. He said he rememnered fireworks. That’s Tet, not Christmas. An easy mistake to make 30 years later. Still a much more plausible story than that stupid cross glurge.
What the hell does Kerry have to do with McCain’s possible goof?
Exactly. This should be about Clinton.
Something a pilot introduced me to once. Kept calling me Billy for some reason.
Gore Vidal wrote an essay about the high degree of S&M in biblical epics- even those like Ben Hur and Barabbas that weren’t drawing from actual biblical stories, or parts of The Ten Commandments that weren’t in the Bible (e.g. Vincent Price and his whip, or bringing Heston manacled in a loin cloth before Pharaoh). Per him it was a conscious decision of the movie makers to get more bucks from the “we hate sex and violence in movies” crowd, who went ape for the same scenes if they came with a Bible story.
Just to recap, this whole thing started from a post on Daily Kos, linked in the OP.
Well, it turns out the author of that piece didn’t even bother to read the Gulag Archipelago before posting his claim, because the passage about the cross in the sand is not in it.
According to Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, this story does not appear in The Gulag Archipelago, nor does it appear in any of Solzhenitsyn’s other written works. And it didn’t even happen to Solzhenitsyn.
So, let’s recap what the claim devolves into - that McCain, who no one disputes suffered hellish tortures in Vietnam, made up a story about a guard drawing a cross in the dirt. We know this because… Well, because we’re pretty sure that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote it first. No wait, he didn’t. But someone might have told it to him, and McCain might have heard it from the guy who told it to him. Or something. The story was mentioned in a sermon in 1997, attributed to Solzhenitsyn. But the attribution is wrong, so we don’t know where the story came from. But we’re pretty sure McCain copied it from someone. Because there’s no way in hell that a closet Christian in a communist country would ever make a sign of the cross in the dirt in sympathy with another captive Christian.
Since this is devolving into a ‘friend of a friend knew a guy who was in a prison camp and had a guard draw a cross in the sand’ kind of story, does it occur to anyone that the orignal source might have been McCain himself? This story was floating around right-wing circles for years, apparently, and repeated by people who knew McCain. It seems just as plausible that McCain mentioned it to someone at a cocktail party or a dinner somewhere, and the story spread and wound up attributed to Solzhenitsyn.
It also seems to me that it’s possible that drawing a cross in the dirt is not exactly uncommon in countries where Christianity is persecuted, and could easily have happened to more than one person. It’s a universal symbol between people who do not speak the same language, it can be quickly erased, or drawn in a way that no one would recognize it unless they looked closely. I wouldn’t be surprised if persecuted Christians had been identifying themselves to each other like this for a thousand years.
This has to be the lamest ‘Swiftboating’ ever.
Aside perhaps from the eponymous one.
Ok, so according to your cite, it’s a story told about Solzhenitsyn in a book by Chuck Colson and repeated by Billy Graham among others. From your link:
So it was a well worn piece of right wing glurge that was active long before McCain lifted it. So he didn’t get it from Gulag Archipelago. That’s not really relevant. The point remains that the story is not original to John McCain. This information debunks nothing.
Unless of course, it WAS original to McCain, and he’s the source of the story. As you say, it was repeated in right-wing circles. Why couldn’t it have been McCain’s story all along? We have an eyewitness who says McCain told him the story in 1971 - said eyewitness also being one of those people in ‘right wing circles’.
And why couldn’t the story have happened to more than one person? For all you know, drawing a cross in the dirt with a stick might be a very common impulse of closet Christians in backwards countries. If a guard was a Christian, and wanted to let a Christian prisoner know that he sympathized with him, wouldn’t making the sign of a cross on the ground be a pretty natural way to do it?
Is there an actual discussion, here? Or are we simply looking at one more interminable “Is too” “Is not” shouting match that probably has no bearing on the real world, regardless of its level of accuracy?
Those dudes vouching for McCain never spoke about this before like two days ago and they’re not reliable witnesses, and I mean that in a good way. They’re his old cellmates. They’re going to get his back no matter what. Using those guys as cites is like using his mother.
If had ever told it before he ran for President, and hadn’t changed details, and hadn’t changed details of other stories, and if it hadn’t already been a trite piece of glurge, I might believe it. I still think it’s possible it’s true, but I also think there’s more than enough reason to raise an eyebrow about it.
I don’t think it has the slightest relevance to the election, though. All vets embellish their war stories.
Actually, it sounds like we’re pretty close to the same position on this. It does seem fairly reasonable to believe that McCain probably appropriated the story as his own. Just like Hillary’s running from the helicopter under fire. But it’s also possible that it’s not, and that this really happened to him. Either way, it’s not that big a deal unless McCain turns it into one. Kerry’s problem wasn’t just that he told a fish tale - it was that he used it in testimony, that he repeated it to bolster his arguments in his book, etc. He made it a major part of his war biography, and kept digging himself deeper holes with it.
Here we go. :rolleyes:
How about the fact that Obama has changed details on his uncle liberating Jews? Or that Ayers wasn’t ‘merely’ a neighbor with whom the entire extent of his relationship was merely that geographic coincidence? Or that Rezko wasn’t merely ‘some guy’ that he worked for through a church charity but actually a substantial political backer? Etc., etc., etc. and on and on?
If you’re going to pick apart details of a story like that of McCain’s for which you have no evidence at all but crap like the above – as if, as someone noted, the idea of a cross in the sand is somehow the type of thing that would need to be lifted from someone’s frickin’ autobio and wasn’t utterly common as an idea forever – then you can damn well pick apart The Magic Negro’s magical uncle. LOL
wow
No he hasn’t. That story has been verified. He just got the name of the camp wrong, which is wont to happen with family stories. But you knew that didn’t you.
Um…yeah, that pretty much IS all there is too it.
You basically believe every single thing you hear on Hannity and Colmes, don’t you. Obama never worked for Rezko. He worked for a law firm that did some charity legal work for a property owned by Rezko (Obama did about 6 hours of legal work on a property being rehabbed for charity). Rezko also raised a few thousands dollars for him early in his political career. So what? There’s no law against that, and there’s never been any allegation, much less evidence that Obama ever did anything illegal or unethical.
Except that you really can’t pick apart Obama, can you? Everything he says checks out. You can’t point to one thing he changed or invented.
And “magic negro?” You’re not even pretending anymore, are you? Why don’t you just call him what you really want to call him.
What I don’t get is, even if the story is true, how does it in any way make McCain a better guy? Or is his former kind hearted VietCong guard running for some elected position and this is McCain’s endorsement?
It’s supposed to prove he really means it when he says he’s a devoted Christian and not just spouting platitudes to get elected. It’s all about reassuring his evangelical base. I suspect the truth is that he’s really a pretty apathetic Christian, but if you’re a Republican, you have to tell the evangelicals that you eat sleep and shit Jesus 24/7.
Looks like there’s another religious McCain story that’s not true (this one having to do with Mother Theresa and one of the girls they adopted):