Stories to woo the religious right
McCain at Sandbag … er … Saddleback
www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/18/cafferty.mccain/index.html
Barack Obama knew the deck would be stacked against him. Perhaps he didn’t know the “cone of silence” ruse was in play - where John McCain got to hear all or part of the questions, along with Obama’s answers – but Barack knows what kind of dirty politics he’s fighting against. And he showed up anyway to give real and honest answers.
That is courage. I don’t see McCain accepting invitations to discussions organized by Democratic Party supporting organizations. Instead McCain told the “cross in sand” story to tug at the Evangelical heartstrings of the audience. The problem is that he never told that story before campaigning for President (the first time), probably because it is from Alexander Solzenitzen’s memoir “The Gulag Archipelago”:
"Laying his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude work-site bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to many other prisoners.
As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly, he lifted his eyes and saw a skinny, old prisoner squat down next to him. The man said nothing. Instead, he drew a stick through the ground at Solzhenitsyn’s feet, tracing the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the sign of the Cross, his entire perspective changed. He knew that he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet in that moment, he knew that there was something greater than the evil that he saw in the prison, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple Cross. And through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.
Solzhenitsyn slowly got up, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Nothing outward had changed, but inside, he received hope."
In McCain’s 2005 book, he stated that he’s a big fan of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writings, which is fine. I just would not expect a serious candidate for President to pretend to be a fictional character from a novel when it suits him politically.
fundamental-truths.blogspot.com/2008/08/mccains-cross-in-sand-story-moving-but.html
obamanewsyoucanuse.blogspot.com/2008/08/mccains-cross-in-sand-storyplagiarized.html
www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/17/122230/161/239/569299
Shortly after John McCain came back from Vietnam in 1973, he wrote a detailed 12,000 word report of his experiences that was published in US News and World Report. Even though McCain goes into a lot of detail in that story and mentions religion a few times, there is no mention of the cross in the sand story, even though it would have fitted in well with the whole narrative. There are numerous mentions of Vietnamese guards in the reports, mostly bad ones but also good ones, but there is no indication at all that any of them would have been Christian.
McCain’s camp is scrambling to find a way to defend the story. Instead of coming up with any documentation that McCain ever told the story to anyone before his 2000 presidential run, they put out a complete non-sequitur. McCain campaign surrogate and former fellow POW Orson Swindle blames the controversy on “the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd.”
Huh? Where in the world is the McCain camp getting Dungeons and Dragons from? Does it have to do with McCain taking the Solzhenitsyn story as his own? Is this some kind of reference to how McCain used to tell this story from the third person, rather than being about himself?
www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-klein/mccains-secret-questionab_b_107409.html
www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/18/cafferty.mccain/index.html
Barack Obama knew the deck would be stacked against him. Perhaps he didn’t know the “cone of silence” ruse was in play - where John McCain got to hear all or part of the questions, along with Obama’s answers – but Barack knows what kind of dirty politics he’s fighting against. And he showed up anyway to give real and honest answers.
That is courage. I don’t see McCain accepting invitations to discussions organized by Democratic Party supporting organizations. Instead McCain told the “cross in sand” story to tug at the Evangelical heartstrings of the audience. The problem is that he never told that story before campaigning for President (the first time), probably because it is from Alexander Solzenitzen’s memoir “The Gulag Archipelago”:"Laying his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude work-site bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to many other prisoners.
As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly, he lifted his eyes and saw a skinny, old prisoner squat down next to him. The man said nothing. Instead, he drew a stick through the ground at Solzhenitsyn’s feet, tracing the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the sign of the Cross, his entire perspective changed. He knew that he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet in that moment, he knew that there was something greater than the evil that he saw in the prison, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple Cross. And through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.
Solzhenitsyn slowly got up, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Nothing outward had changed, but inside, he received hope."
In McCain’s 2005 book, he stated that he’s a big fan of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writings, which is fine. I just would not expect a serious candidate for President to pretend to be a fictional character from a novel when it suits him politically.
fundamental-truths.blogspot.com/2008/08/mccains-cross-in-sand-story-moving-but.html
obamanewsyoucanuse.blogspot.com/2008/08/mccains-cross-in-sand-storyplagiarized.html
www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/17/122230/161/239/569299
Shortly after John McCain came back from Vietnam in 1973, he wrote a detailed 12,000 word report of his experiences that was published in US News and World Report. Even though McCain goes into a lot of detail in that story and mentions religion a few times, there is no mention of the cross in the sand story, even though it would have fitted in well with the whole narrative. There are numerous mentions of Vietnamese guards in the reports, mostly bad ones but also good ones, but there is no indication at all that any of them would have been Christian.
McCain’s camp is scrambling to find a way to defend the story. Instead of coming up with any documentation that McCain ever told the story to anyone before his 2000 presidential run, they put out a complete non-sequitur. McCain campaign surrogate and former fellow POW Orson Swindle blames the controversy on “the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd.”
Huh? Where in the world is the McCain camp getting Dungeons and Dragons from? Does it have to do with McCain taking the Solzhenitsyn story as his own? Is this some kind of reference to how McCain used to tell this story from the third person, rather than being about himself?
www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-klein/mccains-secret-questionab_b_107409.html
posted by zblog at
9:13 PM
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