How low can they go?

186K per second brings us a preview of things to come in the US Presidential election.

It's incredible how the same people who loudly complained about the "swift boating" of John Kerry in 2004, have no problem in 2008 with attacking John McCain's service with far less evidence.

Now we are to believe that his "cross in the dirt" story is suspect (he recounted how once when left tied up with ropes all night, a guard secretly loosened his bonds and made a sign of the cross in the dirt, to tell McCain that he was in solidarity with him - a Christian too). The ever-odious "Balloon Juice", says:

I think there is pretty solid evidence that he’s just copying other peoples’ s**t.

What is this "pretty solid evidence"? Apparently, 1) because Solzhenitsyn wrote about a vaguely similar episode in one of his books, and 2) because McCain didn't mention it in his first account upon release from captivity in Vietnam.

Personally, before I would go accusing a war hero of lying about events, I would want ironclad proof in my corner. But that's just crazy me. The "evidence" above is pretty thin, especially when: #1 if you dig hard enough, you will find some similarity to something anyone said to some author in some book somewhere. Particularly in prison camps where pencils and paper were not available and the only way to write things was often in the dirt. As for #2, the account was a magazine article, which for sake of space could not possibly include every event from his 5+ years of captivity.

On the other hand, McCain's 1999 book, Faith of my Fathers, discusses the episode (it's a heck of a read, and entirely apolitical - so I recommend it whether you support the candidate or not).

Finally, Orson Swindle, a fellow POW, confirmed McCain's story. Of course, he's already been attacked for the sin of being a McCain supporter.

Not surprisingly, this bottom-feeder story is being pushed by the Daily Kos, a partisan web site, which is trying very hard to "mainstream" the story. Andrew Sullivan, as usual, strongly insinuates it without committing himself, as if he's setting up his escape hatch just in case the story blows up in his face. Now he says he will "gladly air any evidence that emerges in McCain's defense", but still neglects to mention Swindle's confirmation.

So why would Obama's supporters stoop to this level? Probably out of an increasing sense of desperation; in a year where the conventional wisdom said that the Republicans didn't have a chance, the two major candidates are drawing dead even right now. Since McCain's major strength is that he has light-years of experience over his opponent, the strategy seems to be to mitigate that advantage by questioning McCain's experience.

It's certainly a risky strategy, and the fact that Obama himself has enough integrity to stay away from it is probably a clue to his supporters that they shouldn't go there.

There's another factor too. Not many people of McCain's generation are around today, and far fewer served in wartime or experienced any real hardship. For most of these bloggers, a purse-snatching is about the closest any of them will come to a life-or-death struggle, and the greatest torture they ever experienced was when their cell phone couldn't get a signal, or the batteries ran down on their iPod. The only starvation any of them experienced was when they had to wait in line for 20 minutes to get their 960-calorie Wendy's triple cheeseburger. I have seen this disconnect in the United States, and even more so in Western Europe. To people who have never experienced real hardships, it's as if such things only happen in the movies.

On the other hand, McCain was tortured, he was starved, and his life was threatened. For more than five years.

Question his honesty all you want, but I would advise against mistaking speculation for evidence. Just my 2 cents.



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