The story sounded suspiciously "contrived" and somewhat familiar all at once.
Yesterday, while perusing some blogs, news sites, and checking my email, my concerns were validated.
I came across this diary from Rickrocket @ DailyKos:
It just sounded so fake and so contrived, so I did a little research about it. Someone on here said it sounded like a scene from Ben-Hur, so I did a google search about Ben-Hur and cross in the sand and such. No dice. But I searched around a little bit more and here is what I found. A story about Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his times in the Soviet Gulags."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.]"
Was is plausible that McCain had such a simular experience as Solzhenitsyn? Considering the details of the stories are so simular, I would have to say no.
But, another Kos diarist takes this even further.
It seems that the website "FreeRepublic" was talking about this 3 years ago:
Posted on Saturday, December 10, 2005 7:49:29 PM by freedomdefender
In Part Four of his new book, "Character is Destiny," McCain writes about his role as chaplain for Christmas service in his Vietnamese prison, and about a guard who snuck in at night to loosen the ropes that bound McCain, and then snuck in in the morning to tighten them before other guards could notice.
The guard said nothing while performing this kindness, but one time, in the yard, "I became aware of him as he walked near me and then, for a moment, stood very close to me. He did not speak or smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground and then, very casually, he used his foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood looking at his work for a minute until he rubbed it out and walked away."
Some of the responses to the story lead me to believe that some Republicans anticipated McCain's run in 2008 and were less than pleased.
Here's the comment that helps put McCain's "retelling" into further context:
Hmmmm. Looks like McCain has been reading Solzhenitsyn.
From The Mayor's daily posts at FR's Finest and The Canteen from the devotional "Our Daily Bread" comes Sunday's reading...
World-famous Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to a Siberian prison because he criticized communism. Languishing there under intolerable conditions year after year, he decided to end his life. But suicide, he firmly believed, would be against God's will. He thought it would be better for a guard to shoot him.
So at a public assembly of the prisoners, he sat in a front row, planning to get up and walk toward an exit, compelling a guard to kill him. But to his surprise, another prisoner sat down, blocking his exit. That unknown man leaned over and, to Solzhenitsyn's astonishment, drew a cross on the dirt floor.
So, the question stands, will we see any reporting on this?
The right-wing blogs have been abuzz since Saturday evening that McCain somehow "won" this discussion. For me, I wasn't operating under the pathetic assumption that there was going to be a "winner" from Warren's forum.
In all honesty, it seemed that this Q&A period wasn't designed to sway any voter one way or another. The Christians and hard-line evangelicals have, at this point, already made up their minds.
In light of what saw when Hillary Clinton's "sniper" comments were shown to be false - there was weeks of constant coverage on that - it would be reasonable to expect the media to tackle this as well.
Whereas Clinton's comments were seen as "creative revisions" at best, McCain is using the fact that he was a POW as a "sheild" of sorts. After all, you can't question a man that was captured and tortured, can you? Considering that McCain is banking on voters ingorance on this and many issues as well as his willingness to use his POW status to create lies that he hopes no one will question, I say he deserves to be questioned.
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