Obama and the netroots: looking a tad desperate these days

[bijou]

Megan's Fourth Law of Politics:  The party that starts looking for implausible and unprovable conspiracy theories about the opposition candidate is in trouble.

This spring, it was bizarre accusations against Barack Obama:  he's a closet muslim, his wife is a black nationalist, etc.  Now, suddenly, the Democrats are the one frantically hunting for buried treasure.

First, the solemn questions about a trivial anecdote from John McCain's time as a prisoner of war:

McCain's been getting a lot of mileage out of his "Christianity-in-captivity" story. It's been in ads, and speeches, and his talks from the pulpit. And for good reason: It's extraordinarily affecting. In it, McCain is spending another Christmas Day locked in a Vietnamese prison. A guard walks up to him and, with his foot, etches a cross in the dirt. McCain and his captor stare at the symbol for a moment, before the guard scratches it away and leaves McCain to his thoughts. "To me, that was faith," says McCain. "A faith that unites and never divides, a faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity."

What's peculiar about this story is that, as a DailyKos commentor noticed, it precisely echoes a tale from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago:


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. It's quite a coincidence. A couple bloggers have started looking for some further evidence that this story actually happened to McCain.

What, exactly, is the point of this exercise?  Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973, the same year that John McCain was released from the POW camp.  There is no way of proving what the bloggers hope, which is that no mention of this story was made until after the book's publication.  And even if that were the case, all it would prove is that John McCain didn't tell this story until after the book's publication, not that it didn't happen.  Vietnam is a country with pretty rich Catholic tradition; tracing a cross in the dirt at Christmas is not something so unthinkably bizarre that it could only have happened in one communist dictatorship. 

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 same.

Then there are the insinuations swirling around McCain's performance at the Rick Warren event, which his supporters are calling a win, and which Obama's supporters are calling a draw, from which I infer that he won.  Since we all know this is impossible, of course he must have cheated:
... more...

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/obama_and_the_netroots_looking.php

She nails DU and its fellow travellers.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Given the substance of the story, it may have been enacted thousands of times worldwide in the old ComBloc countries, most of whom had substantial Christian populations before the dark days of the Reds arrived.  It may even be happening now in some cell in China.