McCain tells the cross in the sand story in his 1999 memoir, Faith of My Fathers:
"We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away. I saw my good Samaritan often after the Christmas when we venerated the cross together."
In his campaign ad in December, he adds mention of "the true light of Christmas":
"We stood wordlessly looking at the cross, remembering the true light of Christmas. I will never forget that no matter where you are, no matter how difficult the circumstances, there will always be someone who will pick you up."
At the Saddleback Civil Forum:
"For a minute there, it was just two Christians worshipping together."
The story has gradually morphed from being about the humanity of the guard to being about the Christian faith of the guard and John McCain.
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Those 3 accounts show subtly different ways of contemplating the event's significance, but they otherwise show that he has consistently told the story the same way as far as what actually occurred.
It's hard for most of us to conceive of what it must feel like to live under a totalitarian regime that punishes people for what they may privately think or feel, whether in prison or not. You can only truly understand the power of a symbol like the cross when it has been banned. And when communicating a simple thought is punishable by torture, drawing a symbol in the sand (or tapping on the wall with your head just to remind a fellow prisoner he's still alive, which McCain also has described doing) would not seem like something only one rare person would have thought of doing.
I agree with the commenter above who said that it's inconceivable to suppose that drawing a cross in the dirt (or star of David, etc.) would not be a common occurrence in these kinds of settings. It hardly takes Fellini to have thought of performing such a basic human gesture.
A little imagination and compassion are in order here.
McCain "borrowed" his cross story from a Russian writer. McCain's website released a statement from Swindle saying he remembered McCain telling him the story in 1971.
Swindle is not telling the truth.
Politco ran a story about McCain's cross story April the 4th 2008 and Swindle was specifically interviewed on the story.
“I don’t recall us talking specifically about our faith,” says Orson Swindle, one of McCain’s closest friends and a fellow POW. “We talked about our friends, families, our resistance posture, and that our country didn’t seem to have the will to win.”
Belief in a higher power helped them survive the routine torture and daily indignities, Swindle says.
“It would help us endure what we had to endure. But we knew God wasn’t going to come down and wave a magic wand.”
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1372E056-3048-5C12-00A06112B1C61A64
McCain is going to have to do better than Swindle on this one.
My concern is not that John McCain recounted some story that he read in a book as his own. My concern is his willingness to tell it in a church. Where is the respect? Also, this seems to be indicative of a larger problem where he changes a story to fit the audience and in doing so sometimes overreach (Remember the Steelers in Pittsburg and Green Bay Packers). Is he someone who will tell us the truth or will he tell us what we want to hear? We are fighting two wars because someone told us what we wanted to hear for 7.5 years.
After that forum, I still don't know John McCain besides the fact that he was a POW in vietnam. Is he a pro-choice candidate as he claimed earlier in his career or is he a pro-life candidate as he claimed on Saturday? Is he a bipartisan candidate that will work with everyone to do what is right or is he the partisan candidate that has voted with Bush 100% of the time. These and more my friends, I do not know and that is my concern with John McCain.
Many of us have experienced life events that have coul have broken us and we survive, but that does not mean that we have the experience or the judgement to do whatever we want. Meaning a prisoner of war does not a president make
I believe I can speak with a degree of objectivity in this matter, since as a conservative I am not particularly enamoured with *either* of the major party candidates.
Marie, it is interesting that you would question McCain's qualifications to be president. Two decades in the US Senate is good experience to understand how to get things done in our nation's capital. Six years as a prisoner of war and the treatment he got which rendered him physically crippled is ample training to understand the folly of "understanding" them or negotiating with them.
Let's compare this to McCain's opponent, who got into the only two offices he's ever held, by default. I am from Illinois so I've been privy to the rolling of the Obama juggernaut for a few years longer than most people.
Obama got into the Illinois Senate in 1996 by getting his opponents kicked off the ballot on technicalities. While in the Illinois Senate he voted "Present" almost 130 times. Not exactly in line with his PR lines of "taking on the tough issues" and "telling people what they don't want to hear". 30 of those times he was either the only Senator to vote present or one of a tiny group who did. One might say this reflects a certain unwillingness to take a stand even when others around him do. In 50 of those Present votes he did so in response to orders from the Democrat Party--not exactly an independent thinker.
When it came to the US Senate election of 2004, running for what was then a Republican-held seat, he faced a popular Republican in Jack Ryan, whose 1999 divorce from actress Jeri Ryan (who played the character "7 0f 9" on Star Trek: Voyager, and "District Attorney Jessica Devlin" on Shark) became a subject of controversy. Their divorce court record had some embarrassing details of the Ryan's conjugal life (imagine that--a politician having sex with his wife!) that both Ryans had agreed to have sealed for the sake of their son--the judge agreed and sealed the record.
Obama's backers, while feigning the high road, and not commenting on the record, were secretly emailing reporters asking them to press for release of the court records. Just after they got a judge to unseal some of the records, Obama suddenly shifted positions and asked that they not be part of the campaign. But Obama's operatives had done their damage--Ryan resigned from the race, which handed the election, again by default, to Obama.
Then came the crown jewel, the presidential election.
The state legislature of Illinois, assuming the favorite son would win the primary, literally moved the Illinois primary election to earlier in the primary season to give Obama a better shot at the nomination (and said that's why they were doing it).
http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/206625,CST-NWS-obama11.article
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2007/05/15/news/doc464a7b993e4c4031226476.txt
I would think that no matter what McCain said, Marie would find fault with him. Either she'd say "His story has been told differently over the last 10 years, so he must have made it up", or she'd say "His story has been told word for word over and over for ten years so obviously it's something memorized and not true." McCain couldn't win her over no matter how he handled it.
Again, I'm not particularly a McCain guy either, so this is not coming from a koolaid-drinker.
Here's my take -- Obama, if elected, will be President Carter II.
Carter was the worst president in US history for three reasons.
First Carter was ineffectual--as a Washington "outsider" he did not have the social network in place to accomplish anything. Obama is running as "the outsider" and so will suffer a similar fate. Having principles is only half the battle, one must know have the wherewithal to get them put into practice.
Second Carter was liberal--socialistic government-centered approaches to social problems have failed everywhere they've ever been tried. That Carter leans sharply to the left is not even debatable. Likewise Obama is arguably the most left-wing of any candidate for president-ever. His close friend BIll Ayers participated in the radical (Communist) Weather Underground bombing of the US Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972, and says they didn't do enough, he has no regrets, and he couldn't rule out the possibility of doing it again. Yet Obama does not distance himself from Ayers, and he even had Ayers and his fellow-bomber wife Bernadine Dohrn host fundraisers for him.
Third, Carter's inexperience made him act unwisely. He gave away the Panama Canal, the most strategic point for naval operations in the Western Hemisphere, to a local petty dictator. He allowed the Ayatollah Khomeni to come to power in Iran, opening the age of Islamo-fascism that gave us 9-11. When he had advance warning of the Teheran embassy attack coming, he did nothing. Perhaps this was because the leftist Carter had decimated the military. Even when Carter finally turned the miltary loose to do their jobs, SIX MONTHS after the embassy takeover, the equipment was in such bad shape because of lack of maintenance that the operation was a miserable failure. Two of the helicopters that had to be abandoned in the desert because of mechanical failure are still used by the Iranian Navy. When the world price of oil jumped in the 1970's Carter slapped on price controls that caused oil not to be delivered to the US--today we may have expensive gasoline relative to ten years ago, but we have never been without...that was not the case 30 years ago--there were days when one could not buy gasoline, thanks to Jimmy Carter and his naive left-wing policies. Obama is similarly a babe-in-the-woods when it comes to acting upon the world stage.
Obama may well win...I dont know if McCain can stop him, and again I'm not particularly a McCain admirer. But a President Obama will certainly damage this country. Hopefully there will be another Ronald Reagan in the wings to clean up after him.
Objective my arse.
I am a registered Republican, and a Christian, who will be voting for Obama. Carter certainly was not the worst president in US history, though perhaps by some accounts the worst in recent US history... that is, until G.W. Bush.
There has not been another President who has so flagrantly, and successfully, stomped all over the Constitution and sacrificed our American Ideals. All for the sake of his "father issues" and a dream of a New World Order as envisioned by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz (Project for the New American Century). Read their 1998 letter to Clinton. It is clear they decided not to wait for an opportunity but set in motion the machinations which would culminate in Bush's election.
Bush has certainly surpassed Carter as the worst President in recent history... and arguably in all U.S. history. John "100 years war" McCain having morphed from a "straight talker" into a lying out both sides of his mouth G.W. Bush II.
Thus, by your reasoning (Obama as Carter II) we should be, and most of us will be, voting for Obama.
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