BlogWonks

It was bad enough that the Democrats and the media started passing around the baseless canard about John McCain cheating at Rick Warren’s forum.

On Sunday night’s Newsroom program, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, pressed megachurch leader Rick Warren about Obama campaign charges that John McCain was cheating by not being in a “cone of silence” during Obama’s interview.

“Last night, I heard you say that McCain would be in a cone of silence, and then half-hour into the event, I hear our guys here at our political desk announced that McCain has just arrived at the worship center. And I’m thinking, you know — hey, if he just arrived at the worship center, he couldn’t have been in the cone of silence, right?”

After Warren give his initial answer about McCain being in a “Secret Service motorcade,” Sanchez pushed two follow-up questions on the matter. In the first, he asked, “Did you think at the time — when you said that, did you think he was in the cone of silence — did you think he was in the building?”

Warren admitted in his answer that he had given Obama a bit of an edge with regards to one question on large-scale government aid to orphans:: “…I also told Senator Obama, since there was one question where I was going to ask for a commitment, it was the commitment later about would you allow a PEPFAR type president’s emergency plan for orphans, and I thought if I was going to ask them for a public commitment, I ought to let him know in advance. I got to tell Barack Obama that in advance. I did not get to tell John McCain that in advance. It caught him by surprise, I’m sure.”

Got that? If anything Barack Obama had an unfair advantage over John McCain at that forum, and not the other way around.  Look, the Obama supporters just have to come to grips with an important reality. Barack Obama does not think well on his feet, and is not good at giving short, focused answers to questions. He does fine making prepared remarks, but that’s it. All of this is why Obama has refused McCain’s challenge to ten town hall debates. Obama knows that he will look bad, so he won’t do them.

But, it’s not enough to make ridiculous claims about McCain cheating. Now the Obama supporters are accusing McCain of plagarising a story he has told about one of the Vietnamese prison guards at the prison camp he was held at drawing a cross in the dirt in McCain’s room.

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.

I disagree with McArdle about the Obama supporters seeming “a tad desperate”. I think it’s quite a bit more than a tad. They’re completely beside themselves, as their perfect candidate is having trouble pulling away from the senile old man that they thought they’d have no trouble blowing out of the water. They don’t understand that their perfect candidate stinks on ice, and their patsy of an opponent is quite a bit more formidable and competent than they thought.