Hmm. I really don’t know what to say, so I’ll let it speak for itself.
From CNN:
During a presidential forum at Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church on Saturday, McCain told a story of a guard who wordlessly drew a cross in the dirt one Christmas, describing it as a moment that gave him strength.
Critics in the blogosphere said that McCain, who was released in 1973, had not mentioned the incident until shortly before his 2000 presidential bid… They also pointed to similarities between McCain’s account and a similar story in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, his account of life in the Soviet labor camp system.
McCain aide Michael Goldfarb, in a message posted on the campaign’s Web site Monday, said Swindle – now a campaign surrogate – told him the presumptive Republican nominee had related the story “’when we first moved in together [in captivity].’ That was in the summer of 1971, Swindle said, though ‘time blurred’ and he couldn’t be sure,” wrote Goldfarb.
He also said that it was logical that Christians in both Russia and Vietnam might have used many of the same subtle signals during that era.
“It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others,” he wrote.
Yeah. Um. Well, to start, I’m no fan of D&D, but I know enough about it to know that there’s little if any link between it and US politics. It seems to me to be pretty clear what Goldfarb was getting at, no matter what segment of geek he hit upon. Basically, he’s making this be geeks vs. jocks, and I think that’s a radically stupid position to take given the way the world leans these days.
What’s more…so what is this saying? To show gratitude and respect, we are supposed to ignore a lie? Is Goldfarb saying I should treat McCain’s speeches with the same reverence (and expect the same lack of veracity) that I would a rambling tale from my grandpa?
I’m very much behind our military. I grew up as a military kid. I believe our military is underpaid and under-appreciated. But, I don’t think you get a free pass to lie without criticism just because you served in the military. Now, I personally believe it is possible that the story was an innocent mistake, similar to Clinton’s memory about her experience in Bosnia. I suspect that once you tell a story to so many audiences so many times, it’s easy to adopt it as your own, to merge it into your own memory as if you were there. If McCain were my grandpa or my friend, I’d cut him some slack. However, when you’re running for office, you don’t get slack.
Is it just me or is McCain’s campaign seeming more and more like a hot pile of soup? No organization, goes all over the place, has components working without cohesion? First, they say that McCain doesn’t speak for his own campaign. Now, they’re taking a cheap shot at geeks ON AN INTERNET WEBSITE, a medium that campaigns adopted BECAUSE of geeks? Where does he think his blog audience is reading from?
Originally found this story on: GamePolitics
Oh, it’s been A-OK for Republicans to embellish war tales since Reagan. He claimed he was in Europe during WW2 shooting footage of liberated death camps, when in reality he never left the US making Signal Corps propaganda films. In speeches he spun plots lifted directly from old movies like they were reality and people ate it up.
But heaven forbid a DEMOCRAT misspeaks on such subjects. People tried to pounce on Obama when he said his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz (actually it was Buchenwald, and a great-uncle, but clearly such outrageous lies make him unfit to lead). Hillary got it for her “sniper fire in Bosnia” gaffe, but admittedly that was the fellow Dems as much as the GOP. And don’t even get me started on Kerry and Gore.
Also, the D&D crowd hearts Ron Paul. Duh.