I think everyone should let this one go. Any debate about what happened to John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton is a debate John McCain will win.

so does this mean the daily kos lied also?

DNC Ad Hit McCain 4 $5million Blunder

Egg.

On the collective face of the progressive movement.

Desperate and deliberately mean in spirit, just as the Republicans (who denounced Corsi) said.

Watch Act II - Cindy's half sister, developing...

Great idea, let's give them as many opportunities to weave their narrative as we can.

Grrhhh.

Our political discourse is so stupid.

Yep, arguing that McCain made up the story makes us look small. There are real issues we can win on. We need to focus on those.

Probably Drudge blogged about it on Daily Kos under a pseudonym. He's really good at leading progressives down a dead-end street.

I don't think this happened to McCain and believe it was likely Salter who added it in McCain's story to add to the McCain lore, but there is really no way of proving or disproving it, and as has been mentioned it's a political loser for the Dems.

McCain probably believes it now, and Salter is likely the only person who could discredit it and he surely isn't going to do that.

I think there is something to be learned from the half-sister story, especially given how McCain tells the Mother Theresa Orphanage story for political gain.

I agree. This is from and it pretty much sums up my feelings as to why it's a legitimate issue to raise:

It's worth noting that pursuing the cross-in-the-dirt evangelical parable as it might have happened to McCain is in no way impugning anyone's war record. No one is disputing in any way what McCain did in Vietnam, his heroism, his sacrifice or any jot and tittle of his combat in arms and time in captivity. What we're curious about is how an urban legend in Christianist circles (attributed to Solzhenitsen but originating, so far as one can tell, in Chuck Colson) reshaped and altered an actual, utterly believable story of rare humanity in a prison camp. And how a campaign not only adopted the improved story but then wielded it in a campaign ad and as a critical message to evangelicals. If that ad is not actually true - and its depiction of the cross in the dirt we know is false (according to McCain, it was done with a sandal; in the ad it is done, as in Colson's account, with a stick) - it's a question of challenging a campaign's veracity, and what can only be called a cynical use of religion. Could the campaign confirm that the ad itself is visually incompatible with the Salter story? Or were they unconcerned with such detail, assuming no one would be foolish enough to question a war hero's unconfirmable anecdote - and eager merely to show the deeper (and true) point that McCain relied on God to survive the unimaginable?

This incident is not part of McCain's military service - certainly not one he thought was in any way salient in his first 12,000 word account of his experience. It is part of his 2000 and 2008 campaigns and the religious mythology they coopted in order to appeal to a very specific audience. If a blogger cannot raise factual questions about a campaign ad and a campaign narrative, he's not really worth much.

If you want a simple campaign question how's this: why did John McCain approve a message about a searing event in his life when the image in the ad is not compatible with what he said happened?

This story will never be proved or disproved either way.

I actually remember that story from going to a born again church with the ex-wife. It was used to illustrate a point in a sermon kind of thing.

It is not an uncommon story.

McCain could own up to it as soon as Obama admits his name is Soetoro and that he was an Indonesian citizen studying the Koran and learning Arabic while McCain was a POW.

That seems fair.

The 1960 film "Spartacus" (or one of the other "early Christian" epics) features a scene where the protagonist meets a slave in prison, who spills some wine and draws a cross (or a fish?) to communicate his faith. He then wipes over the symbol to hide the communication.

Are you unaware Wallace, that JohnW actually did participate in liberating a Nazi Concentration Camp?

Too bad for you, and so much for Conservatives repecting someone's military record.

Which, come to think of it, was exactly what JohnW was talking about.

This story has been making the rounds in evangelical churches for a long time. Sometimes attributed to Solzhenitsyn, sometimes to a persecuted Christian in a concentration camp, it always a crowd pleaser.

Christ Colson again. I look forward to the day that former Nixon henchmen have no more influence anywhere. The last 7+ years have been Nixon's revenge via Cheney and Rumsfeld, who felt that Nixon was robbed of his Executive Greatness by partisan Democrats. Burglar Liddy keeps the airwaves buzzing on talk radio.

For what it's worth, the Solzhenitsyn story shows up in a book called Bible Oases from 1994 (page 56). You can see the passage on Google Books.

Bible Oases: Spiritual Refreshment from Unlikely Places
By Ivor Powell
Published by Kregel Publications, 1994
ISBN 082543520X, 9780825435201
208 pages

Chuck Colson, while in prison?, found Jesus and accepted him as his Lord and Savior, became a minister and quickly ignored the 'Thou shalt not bear false witness..'commandment?

How typically right wing of old Chuckie.

It's good to debunk a myth, and it's fair to point out who played a role in getting the myth started. That said, using words like "wingnut" about Chuck Colson and dismissing him as a "Watergate felon" -- which he is, but that's just one part of his long life -- is pretty unfortunate. He did what he did in Watergate, and he was what he was before then.

Nevertheless, Colson has for decades now labored extensively to change how criminal justice is done in this country. The United States has an incarceration that vastly exceeds that of any other country in the world, and punishments for which the word "draconian" may be understatement. Sadly, criminal justice reform, despite its tremendous importance and despite the magnitude of the injustices, in relative terms has gone pretty neglected by the left -- maybe the willingness to simply dismiss Colson as a "wingnut" even now is a demonstration of the low priority the left places on justice reform.

It's also not clear from the small amount of evidence presented here that Colson did anything other than repeat a story that he had heard from someone else. And even if he was more at fault than that, it happened in 1983 -- 25 years ago. A lot of good work that progressives ought to value and respect has happened since then.

Personally, I think that pushing negative stuff specifically about his time as a POW is radioactive if it comes from anyone in or near the campaign.

On the other hand, a bit of well founded buzz coming from distant folks could be helpful.

As to this particular story, there's an interesting comment over at dKos relating to this.

It can be found buried in a huge thread at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/19/11438/1343

But there are two key points -- 1) without any of our help, this guy in the core McCain demo recognized the story as older than the hills. In this context, that it wasn't part of Gulag makes sense -- it's an older, urban legend thing [probably partly informed by Ben Hur] and it just got attached to Solzhenitsyn by the Colson crowd. 2) It turned him completely off McCain [again without any help from us] -- and remember someone not voting for McCain who might have been counted on is as valuable as getting someone to vote for Obama.

Begin quoted material [sorry, I'm not so great with html tags so don't know if thiw will come out right]:

i happen to know a real POW, one who did not get preferrential treatment due to his dads rank and status. he was taken prisoner during the germans in WWII. he has only spoken of his experience briefly in the 10 years i have known him one time and the one thing he said that i will never forget is he has never forgotten a single second of any of it but doesn't like to talk about any of it. he is a fox watching democrat hating lemming of a republican to the inth degree. always has been. it has never bothered me because he is a really nice guy and someone i consider a good friend. we have this damn storm rolling through florida as we speak, yesterday it was predicted to be much worse that the downgraded status it currently has, so on my way home i stopped by his place to see if he needed any help getting things put away ahead of the storm. he had his roof torn off in 2004 by hurricane charlie so he is a true believer in being prepared. he didn't need my help but as usual, i had to get my democratic digs in on him- we have done this back and forth for many years. but this time? remember, these are words from a POW about McSame, not mine, they come from a POW who has McSame stickers on his car and McSame yard signs all over... i asked what he thought about the "cross in the sand" flap. quote, "he's a lying mother fucker, he is now just making shit up, that story is as old as i am" (he's 87) i asked if this meant that he changed his mind about voting for him, " i won't vote for someone who can lie so easily about every damn thing he did as a POW, hell no". he said he's taking the stickers off and the yard signs down but hoping the storm does it for him first so he doesn't have to waste his time. he said he won't vote for obama under any circumstance, but that aside, Mr. POW just pissed off a POW who now refuses to support or vote for him. i found that to be very interesting to say the least, particularly coming from him, a diehard Gooper.

by playtonjr on Tue Aug 19, 2008 at 03:58:05 AM PDT

Here's a very simple, factual, easily-resolved question on this issue: Is it true that in his Christmas ad, McCain told the story of the guard making a cross in the sand with a stick, and at the Saddleback event he described the guard as making a cross in the sand with his sandal?

I know it makes no difference if it's the story that is your main focus ...... but if it was a memorable event in your life, wouldn't you recall it thd same way whenever you described it?

I don't know, nor can I access YouTube to check it out until tomorrow afternoon. Does anyone recall?

Dang, all this time I thought he got it from Ben Hur!

I know a possible literary source for the 'cross-in-the-dirt' story. This story is described in almost exactly the same way McCain tells it in a science fiction story set in a future society in which religion is outlawed. The story is called "The Quest for Saint Aquin" by Anthony Boucher. Here's a link for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Saint_Aquin
The protagonist, stopped by a soldier, makes a secretive sign of the cross. The soldier responds wordlessly by drawing the ancient Christian fish symbol in the dirt with the toe of his boot. Now you see it on the backs of SUVs, but it used to be a symbol of the underground Christian church. The hero and the soldier in that instant form a secretive understanding, just like McCain and his guard. The sympathetic soldier lets the protagonist go free.
The story was published in 1951.
I found the parallels rather uncanny.

... when in fact, the guard was just wanting to start a game if tic tac toe and it was misunderstood...

Everyone is doing it. Everyone, everywhere I go on the web, is adopting the word "progressive" without ever coming to any agreement about what it is, what it obligates us to do, anything.
A perfect trap. At this point, I am beginning to believe "progressive is a false-flag operation.

When I have people insisting vociferously, they are "progressive libertarians" I know we are in big trouble.

There's gonna be a mess if this problem isn't looked at.

The Republicans can, as this story well shows, synchronise the tropes and memes of their ideology with the common denominators of popular entertainment, (including "evangelical stories" as one poster has it).

When a Party can do this as consistently and skillfully as the Repubs lately they are extremely hard to beat. Popular entertainment scripts serving the same purpose as Scripture used to.

When McCain tells this story it seems true, it must be true, because it's already floating around in their heads from BenHur and the rest. And the wonderful emotional high from both the self-righteousness and the familiarity translate into political advantage.

I wonder if anyone has ever told this story with a Star of David instead of a cross?

I dunno. I think borrowing someone else's poignant prisoner story and using it to embellish your own demonstrates a couple of things. One, it rather punctures the "He NEVER likes to talk about his p.o.w. experience" myth. I mean, practically every other word out of the guy's mouth is "p.o.w.," and it's hard to argue you don't like talking about it when you go to the extra trouble of making things up to polish it up and make it sparkle a bit more. T'other is that since that IS supposed to be the holy-of-holies in his life story, it sure says a lot about him that he's willing to squeeze it for extra pathos and tuck a little good stuff he got from somebody else's life, all in the service of marketing himself as a political candidate. The phrase I'm groping for here, I believe, is "sell-out."

And the fact that the story wasn't from Solzhenitsyn but was in fact made up by a watergate criminal turned bahble thumper, Colson, who probably got it from Cecil B De Mille, and was then tossed around in conservative Christianist circles only makes it all the more likely McCain's ghost-writer came up with it--probably didn't even remember where he'd heard it, just some story, a good 'un--and they both agreed it was too choice not to have occurred to Saint John and therefore musta somehow happened and who could tell the difference anyway.

Perfect example of what a waste of time a lot of "citizen truth finding" in the blogosphere is. All the bandwith and time wasted, writing and reading crapola, amateur research, supposition, accusations, blather.

Why not just go to directly to the people who have actually studied the work? If it takes a day or two, so be it. Instead of reading oceans of crap by Tom Dick Harry and Louise who haven't read Solzhenitsyn but googled what someone else said about what someone said that read some of him, and who haven't read what Senator McCain and his ghostwriters have put out, but read what someone said he put out.

Time saved by waiting for the info. by someone who actually knows the topic can be spent learning something from someone who actually has expertise on another topic of greater importance, ya think?

Really, this kind of feeding frenzy by amateurs on points of minutae in the blogosphere is no different from the worst cable TV news.

Note for Greg Sargent: I think of this sort of thing whenever people start criticizing you because you haven't posted on this breaking or that breaking story. Please consider this: the more you fall for the breaking guilt, the poorer your journalistic skills and reputation might get. Consider spending more of your time on complete storiesr rather than feeding the breaking junkies.

Just an aside, but I wonder how Cindy McCain felt when her beloved husband 'sadly' proclaimed that his greatest regret in life was leaving his first wife. failing in that marriage. well, at least becoming vastly richer eased his pain. trophy wife..yuck

Okay, on the TPM homepage Josh is featuring an e-mail from a "Republican pal" who advises the Dems to go after McCain on this story with both barrels loaded.

Tells me we shouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Repubs don't want facts, they want myths.
Well, this is the time for McCain to own this myth, and let him have it, I say. And if that guy says to attack it, wouldn't surprise me if they've got a little old former North Vietnamese prison guard holed up in a Hilton somewhere, tracing crosses on the carpet.

Oh, RATS!!! And here I was thinking that McCain's Boswell was stealing from literary sources. But Chuck Colson? As related by Jesse Helms by way of Billy Graham? Maybe with Newt Gingrich playing bongos in the background with Hillary Clinton on bass while Bill riffs on sax?

With all the lies that Senator McCain has told about his life, either directly or by telling Salter "that sounds like something I'd say" after being read the next page of his new book, what's another? But if we must have yet another one, it's nice that several of McCain's probable cabinet seem to have been involved.

It's unfortunate that Senator Obama plays into the McCain/Bush/MSM game by continuing to try and take the high ground. It keeps the contest uneven. As one of Colson's mentors once said: "you don't get elected by being nice."

This story goes to credibility. Americans are tired of being lied to. After all we were lied into a war. We demand more from our politicians -- truth, honesty, integrity? Is that too much to ask from someone who would be leading the nation? After all do we like being lied to from our spouse, lover, children? I think not. This is the same kind of relationship. If there are any investigative journalists out there, they need to get to the truth or falsity of this story.

It's entirely possible that McCain, not having hung out with the wingnuts and knowing nothing of blogs, the web, etc., may have heard this anecdote told and not known it had been out and around as widely as it was. Thinking the image obscure he may have thought it ripe for appropriation (leaving out his pathological identification with AS). This is a common technique used by students who set out to plagiarize. Find the obscure source and make it your own.

I see the making of a great campaign ad, if the clip from Ben Hur can be found and used. Call it "Line in the Sand". Also clips from Packers and Steelers games (re McCain claiming to use their names when told to give up the names of his comrades but naming different teams to different crowds in speeches). "It might have been ok to lie to the Vietcong, but it's not OK to lie to the American people". All easy to portray, with McCain's insipid voice damning himself each time. Then show how McCain won only the default medals given to POWs and did less than most of them, how most of them refused early release as a matter of course, not just McCain "Honorable, but hardly exceptional." (see this for example http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,164859_1,00.html)

Could start out with a clip from the use of Ben Hur in the "The One" ad. "Seems John McCain has a fixation on old movies" (subtle dig about his age).

We could end with something like "we have to draw a line in the sand against this kind of dishonest exploitation of our most cherished symbols. We deserve better from a president." (Implies he's a kind of moral vampire (in that we have to draw a cross to ward him off), sucking off the trust of the nation, which isn't entirely inaccurate).

If this idea appeals at all, consider it open source.

Amen to all!

He has been given special privilage in his younger years because his father was a Navy Admiral ... he gained the status of "Hero" because his father was a Navy Admiral ... he got into politics because his father declared him a war "Hero" ... he's been riding on the coat tails of his father all of his life. SICK OF IT. Show me something new and admiral (nice play on words) in his recent years that makes him presidential material.

What an entertaining post! How often do we get to see the rising specter of Chuck Colson combined with John McCain tales - it looks and smells like brown body waste.
Maybe both Chuck and John are like John Ashcroft and they can't rely on the source of their own recollections. They might be real, they might not.
They can be pulled out of an asshat whenever it's expedient all the same.

Solzhenitsyn's /The Gulag Archipelago/ weighs in at close to 2000 pages in three volumes. Only a scholarly researcher like Jerome Corsi would have the patience and tenacity to wade through /The Gulag/. :p