McCain trifecta: caught lying, cheating, plagiarizing

John McCain had a bad weekend. He was caught effectively cheating at the civil forum at Saddleback Church on Saturday evening. He had promised to be in a “cone of silence” while Obama was asked questions by Rick Warren, so he wouldn’t know what they were ahead of time. Instead, he apparently was able to listen in to the point that he blurted out answers to the questions before Warren finished asking them.

From the Times story:

The matter is of interest because Mr. McCain, who followed Mr. Obama’s hourlong appearance in the forum, was asked virtually the same questions as Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain’s performance was well received, raising speculation among some viewers, especially supporters of Mr. Obama, that he was not as isolated during the Obama interview as Mr. Warren implied.

That’s called lying. And cheating.

Mr. Warren started by asking Mr. McCain, “Now, my first question: Was the cone of silence comfortable that you were in just now?”

Mr. McCain deadpanned, “I was trying to hear through the wall.”

In fact, McCain was being driven in his car at the time, where, yes, he had access to Obama’s Q&A session.

Then, something that goes more to his character: McCain was caught plagiarizing a story that — he claimed — happened while he was a POW. Turns out it never did; he stole the idea from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Yep, that’s right: McCain not only got caught flat-out lying about what happened to him, he stole the idea from someone else.

Solzhenitsyn’s experience:

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.
(Luke Veronis, “The Sign of the Cross”; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.)

What McCain wrote in Faith of my Fathers and repeated last night

One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn’t smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away.

In one version of McCain’s story, the guard used his foot. In another version, he uses a stick. And, despite having spoken and written about his experience in prison many times since he returned from Vietnam, the first time the “cross in the dirt” story made its appearance was in 1999, when Faith of My Fathers was published as part of his presidential campaign.

Oh, and McCain has said he’s a big Solzhenitsyn fan.

Amazing, this guy.