Okay, a bit of context. McCain’s entire statement of faith essentially boils down to one story about when he was a prisoner of war. It’s a pretty touching story. One of his captors was unexpectedly kind to him. Later, on Christmas Day, when the prisoners were let out to stand for a few minutes in the sun, the same guard silently came up to McCain and drew a cross in the dust between the two of them, left it there a minute, then erased it, all without saying a word.
It’s quite a story. And it’s an even better story if it’s true. The problem is that it didn’t appear in McCain’s earliest account of his story in 1973. It’s also strikingly similar to a passage from “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, released in the U.S. in 1973. We also know McCain is a fan and reader of Solzhenitsyn’s work, as evidenced by this article Solzhenitsyn at Work by John McCain. Is the story true? Does it recount a common sign used both in Vietnam and in the USSR? I don’t know. It’s enough to raise some eyebrows and perhaps prompt a bit of investigation. If it were a copyright case, it would be enough to get it to a jury. So what does the McCain camp say about this? See above.
My conclusion? I’ll give McCain the benefit of the doubt on the story, until somebody digs up something else. The dates are quite a coincidence—and if Goldfarb is accusing people of attacking McCain’s memory, which wasn’t previously at issue, rather than his honesty, which was, I wonder whether they’re setting up an “Oops, it was stressful and I sometimes get my fact and fiction confused.” But whatever. Benefit of the doubt. Still I won’t give his campaign a pass on the pettiness and nastiness of his campaign’s response to a legitimate inquiry.
If anybody comes across something that deliberately nasty from an Obama spokesman point it out to me and I’ll write about it. But I don’t think you’ll be able to.
