McCain, the Truth & Plagiarism

In the recent Saddleback Forum John McCain trotted out the story of being in the POW camp at Christmas and a guard drew a cross on the ground and the two men stood there looking at it. He said that this was a life changing experience for him. He also told this story in a Christmas ad. The trouble is that this story, while it happened, it happened to someone else - Alexander Solzhenitsyn. What does this say about the man who would be president?

The Gulag Archipelago (1973) contained a story about a fellow prisoner that drew a cross in the dirt and that symbol gave Solzhenitsyn hope and the will to survive the experience. John McCain, who once praised Solzhenitsyn, now steals from him. John McCain has no need to lie about his experience in the POW camp - he was tortured regularly, given little hope of getting out, and had to recover from serious injuries after getting shot down. Why make something up like this? Why did he only start mentioning this story in 1999 when he wrote a detailed account of his experience in 1973 and never mentioned this very powerful story? the answer can only be two possibilities - 1. He is a liar and will say anything in ingratiate himself to a crowd. His life has so few spiritual episodes that he had to lift one off of another author to balance his life of adultery, anger, and bribe taking. 2. He is getting senile and thought that what he read in the Gulag Archipelago happened to him. I don't know which possibility is more disturbing. If McCain had submitted this story as a paper in school he would have been expelled. What would possess someone to tell a fib like this? Especially one so easy to reference in his own writing and in the writing of others - it just doesn't make sense.

Joe Biden was drummed out of the 1988 presidential campaign over a plagiarism scandal for using a line from British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. He did credit Kinnock four times for the quote but neglected to do so the fifth time. His own party pounced on him like vultures and ran him out of the campaign. This is hardly as bad as what McCain did, first in his Christmas ad and then last weekend at Saddleback - his lie was an attempt to ingratiate himself to a group where he has had problems, the religious right. Maybe he is taking a play out of the George W. Bush playbook - if you tell a lie enough times and get other people to repeat your lie then it becomes truth. Why not? This tactic has worked so famously for the guy who had his campaign "anonymously" use push polls and rumors to suggest that McCain fathered a black child out of wedlock, that his wife was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was either a Manchurian Candidate or a willing traitor.

I thought that McCain had done better than Obama in this forum - he seemed comfortable, articulate, and effective. It was not Obama's night. Now I am disturbed at how easy and natural it is for the Straight Talk Express to lie. At least George Bush is a bad liar (not that he still doesn't get away with it) - you can see it in his face, in his insane cackle, and in his body language.

Obama Nation: a work of fiction

Obama Nation hit the bookstores as a bestseller . . . or did it. It appears that the deceptions of this book do not end with the bibliography. This book made the bestseller list due to huge bulk orders and strategically placed purchases it is these forces that are behind the book's supposed success.

Mr. Corsi, how many copies of your own book did you buy? 1,000? 10,000? More? The right wing machine bought up huge numbers of this piece of kindling to attempt to lend it credibility and to get Corsi on the talk show circuit. According to Mary Matalin, the book's publisher, it is a piece of scholarly work and would neither deny or confirm that there was any fact checking at all for this book. Which I take to mean - no fact checking. Media matters has gone through the book and done an excellent job of exposing the lies in his book. These lies which range from accusing him of being a Muslim to continued drug use and other ridiculous assertions. There are too many falsehoods in this book to comment on them all but Corsi, like so many conservatives, conflates the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq and uses this conflation to suggest that Obama wants to start pulling out of Afghanistan. This can't be further from the truth. Obama not only has repeatedly called for removing troops from Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan but actually introduced a bill in 2007 saying just that. I personally don't think that either war was or wise to get involved in but Obama has not said any of the things Corsi accuses him of.

As someone with a graduate degree in history and has spent countless hours reading actual scholarly works, the excerpts I read do not measure up to even a poor scholarly work. What really makes Corsi's work a piece of garbage is that he admits that the purpose of this book was to discredit Barak Obama. It's one thing to reach these conclusions after doing objective research it is quite another to reach this conclusion and search and/or make up facts to support a predetermined outcome.

This piece of fiction would not even be worth covering except for the fact that Faux News and the like put this guy on and let him spew this nonsense without challenging any of the facts. I am sure a lot of people will read this book and believe what it has to say because it is on the bestseller list and because they see this guy on TV. However, if you want to read some fiction there are a lot more entertaining reads out there. I don't know what it is about this smear machine that has cropped up but the but they certainly do not seem to be deterred by annoying things like the facts. There are plenty of good ideological critiques that can be made of Obama from a conservative point of view but Obama Nation is not one of them. It seems to be effective to repeat a lie so many times that it becomes accepted as fact - Corsi and the Swiftboat Liars did it in 2004 and Corsi is at it again. It's the same mouth-breathing mentality that Faux News is guilty of every time they show a picture of Osama Bin Laden and have an "Obama" caption under it. They think they are being cute but they are being stupid and making America more stupid at the same time. I have a question for those that actually buy and read this book - why?