Month: August 2008

And the day after Obama’s acceptance speech:

“You’re going to own the weekend,” a McCain official said.

Byron York gets testimony from Mark Salter that McCain told him that story:

As part of the book research, Salter says, he said to McCain, "Give me personal experiences about all three categories. So he talked about a couple of Christmas services that they had, the event known as the ‘church riot,’ and the punishment cell. And he told me the ‘cross in the dirt’ story, which we used in the book and in speeches."

This tracks with the Robert Timberg account of McCain’s Christmas references, with one omission. Guess what?

The chapter is titled "’Tis the Season to Be Jolly." It says that on Christmas Eve 1968, a guard tried to compel McCain to attend a church service that was being staged for the benefit of visiting photographers. McCain decided "to ruin the picture," letting out a series of curses ("’Fu-u-u-u-ck you, you son of a bitch!’ shouted McCain, hoisting a one-finger salute whenever a camera pointed in his direction"). There’s certainly no mention of a cross in the sand in this account.

On Christmas Eve 1969, we’re then told, McCain had a civil conversation with the Cat, the one guard he’s said in other accounts was considerate to him — but again there’s no mention of a cross in the sand.

(Timberg tells us that McCain and the Cat discussed the Cat’s tie clip and cigarette lighter, as well as McCain’s decision not to accept early release.)
 
On Christmas 1970, Timberg writes, McCain was transferred to a cell with his friend Bud Day — "the perfect Christmas present" because he’d just spent two and a half years in solitary.  Again, no cross.

Now the reason this is weird is that it’s not just one memory out of countless ones. It’s a very specific Christmas memory about a character McCain recounts in other anecdotes – and was a significant enough memory to be packaged as a Christmas-themed campaign ad last year. But this riveting story which McCain "will never forget" didn’t occur to McCain when asked to come up with Christmas memories in captivity in 1995. Salter explains that McCain could easily have forgotten it because it was not "pivotal." Watch the ad again and listen to McCain’s testimony from Saturday night. It sure sounds pivotal to me – something that would surely resonate deeply over the years.

This is not about impugning McCain’s heroism. His decision to forgo early release in Vietnam – despite being subjected to "enhanced interrogation" – makes him a far, far better man than I and most of us will ever be. It is about how Christianism corrupts a campaign. And how even a man like McCain is susceptible to these pressures.

The first glimmers of skepticism about McCain’s recovered memory of a religious epiphany in 1999 came from the far right.

Libby Copeland takes aim at Barr:

Is there any human being on the planet more committed to his seriousness than Bob Barr? The 59-year-old Barr is so into the Founding Fathers that most of his phone numbers, including his cellphone, end in “1-7-7-6.” He only reads weighty books, his wife says, like “George Washington on Leadership.” He talks about himself in the third person. In his office, he keeps a photo of himself as a Republican congressman — calling for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Even Bob Barr’s mustache is serious.

Ed Morrissey wishes Barr were treated better.

Dean Barnett thinks the cross in the dirt wild goose chase betrays a sense of panic among Obamaphiles:

By all means, let’s focus more attention on McCain’s stint at the Hanoi Hilton. Maybe the Obama campaign will offer up as a counterpoint Obama’s supremely courageous opposition to the Iraq War while on the front lines of the Illinois state legislature. And by all means, let’s have the left continue its campaign to minimize McCain’s service in Vietnam. That should work wonders for Obama!

Megan is similarly puzzled:

The only way this would actually hurt McCain is if you found a signed letter from him saying that this never happened. Since it’s very unlikely that such a letter exists, the very best that this effort will achieve is sowing seeds of doubt in a few minds, making themselves look desperate to almost everyone else (and thereby making people wonder what’s wrong with Obama, that they’re this desperate), and outraging a number of people that you would call McCain’s honor into question with absolutely no evidence, or hope of obtaining [some].

Sure: theres no political paydirt here and a lot of backlash. But I’m a blogger and I’m curious. And, pace Dean, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that this anecdote was embellished by Mark Salter for effect. It never occurred to me to question this story until I looked into it. Now it tugs. As for it being spin in the campaign after McCain’s Saddleback triumph, since I haven’t questioned the strength of McCain’s performance, I don’t see why I should now be trying to undermine it.

But the compromises McCain has made in his pursuit of power strike me as central to this election. And I’ll follow these leads wherever they lead, even if they lead nowhere.

A young supporter of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Sen. Barack Obama looks on during a town hall meeting at Rio Grande High School August 18, 2008 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sen. Obama is campaigning in New Mexico before traveling to Florida. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Ross defends Warren against my criticisms:

Warren, to his credit, didn’t pose a metaphysical question, or a biological one. He asked a legal question: "At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?"  Obama tried to dodge by saying that from a "theological perspective" or a "scientific perspective" the issue is "above his pay grade." But Warren asked a more narrow question, and one that any politician who votes on abortion laws should be able to answer. And of course, as a supporter of Roe and Casey, Obama does have an answer: He thinks that a baby acquires rights when it’s born – well, perhaps depending on how and why it happens to be born – and lacks them at every juncture before birth. He just didn’t want to come out and say it.

Legally, this issue is moot as long as Roe is in force. Theologically, it is a thicket, as Ross understands. I think Obama’s position was completely defensible and more thoughtful than McCain’s. But less effective.

Michael Goldfarb calls any questions about the cross-in-the-dirt story desperate smears:

Those desperate to discredit Senator McCain’s record will have to impugn his fellow prisoners as well. Orson Swindle, who was held as a prisoner of war along with McCain, tells the McCain Report that he heard this particular story from McCain "when we first moved in together." That was in the summer of 1971, Swindle said, though "time blurred" and he couldn’t be sure. He said it was some time around then that the Vietnamese moved all "36 troublemakers" into the same quarters, where they "talked about everything under the sun."

Here is how Swindle describes it to Byron York:

"I vaguely recall that story being told, among other stories."

Convinced? The answer as to why McCain never mentioned this in his first account or for a quarter century since and didn’t even recall it when asked to recount memories of three separate Christmases in captivity is dismissed with the usual gambit:

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.

Ben Smith notes:

The easiest way to knock this down would be with an instance of McCain mentioning it between his captivity and 1999.

Somehow I doubt that will happen, don’t you?

Hemingway revises:

…my point was that just because only God can say with certainty where sentient life begins, it doesn’t mean the president gets to opt out of staking a moral position on the matter that will determine policy. Think of it this way: in a perfect world, only God would decide who lives or dies. And yet, the President still has to frequently decide to send soldiers out to certain death in service of national security and the greater good. Are such decisions above the Commander-In-Chief’s "pay grade"?

Well, no, because he is directly responsible for the lives of the men and women he commands. But an embryo inside another person’s womb requires a more indirect answer, no? And the existential question of when an embryo gets "human rights" cannot be answered without knowing when an embryo or zygote becomes a human person. And on that question, even the Vatican is silent. There is a life issue here and a liberty issue here, and I think it’s perfectly possible for a presidential candidate to leave unanswerable existential questions to the Almighty and focus on practical policy questions which he can address. And Obama did.

He is not running for theologian-in-chief, however much the Christianists want to make this election about faith, and who most reflects their version of it.