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.