McCain's cross in the sand story...PLAGIARIZED?

Last night at the Saddleback Forum, McCain emotionally reitterated his story about the cross in the sand drawn by a guard while he was captured in Vietnam.
The camera panned to a sympathetic Cindy McCain as the Evangelists cheered. But today all across the blogosphere and even in the Huffington Post, his story is decried as plagiarism from an Andrew Solzhenitsyn account of a too similar experience while he was detained in a Soviet camp. It just so happens that McCain is a great fan of Solzhenitsyn (maybe he thought his base wouldn't be intellectual enough to have read any Solzhenitsyn). Politics as usual - a little more serious that the Hillary sniper fire story - a lot more serious than the Cindy McCain recipe plagiarism. :>) But McCain sould be called on it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/17/122230/161/239/569299 Long story short. In 1973, a russian author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, wrote about his time in in the book "The Gulag Archipelago" and relayed exactly the same story.

From the book:

"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.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible."

There is a nice long excerpt from John McCain's book "Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions " released in 2005, reprinted in the NY Sun, about what a big fan he is of Alexander Solzhenitsyn writings...

We all keep repeating how we respect and appreciate John McCain's service to our country as a captive (although you really should check out the information about the other part of his naval career - a good place to start is at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-klein/mccains-secret-questionab_b_107409.html, but we expect the truth from a man who now is running for our President.

Nine Houses & $520 Shoes?

Carol McCain & Children Praying for John in Vietnam

Everyone agrees that this election is Barack Obama's to win after 8 years of the Bush catastophe, the poor economy, the energy crisis, and the War in Iraq. So why are the polls so close? Why can't Barack break that magic 50%? Political pundits and the McCain campaign say its because we just don't know enough about Barack Obama. That he is exotic, not like one of us. That he hasn't been around long enough for us to know well.
Well, WHAT DO THEY WANT? Obama has written two biographical books, has repeated his life story over and over on the air and on a biographical tour across the country. I can repeat intimate details about he and his grandfather watching the astronauts land in the ocean, and his grandmother feeding him jello with grape halves. I've seen pictures of him as a small boy, of his mother and father and grandparents, of Barack at Harvard, of Barack as an organizer on the streets of Chicago, and on and on and on. And, "exotic"? I say "experienced" in life.
Why aren't we talking about McCain in this way? Why aren't we talking about his NINE houses, his $520 shoes, and the fact that his judgement wasn't so hot when he cheated on and then left his first wife and three children for a model and beer heiress named Cindy who was almost 20 years younger than he?(Scroll down to read my July 18th blog on THAT event in John McCain's life.)
Barack Obama said he would never smear Cindy McCain the way that the McCain campaign did to Michelle. Maybe its up to the rest of us to fight fire with the truth.
Rachel Maddow argues these points in the following video on Race for the Whitehouse yesterday.