There have been a number of stories about McCain lying. Granted, McCain has made a number of false and conflicting statements about his past beliefs and even his past behavior. But that does not mean he is lying.
To lie one must be cognizant that what you are telling people is false. While President Reagan told many untrue stories, he was not lying. As we now know, this was the early stages of his Alzheimer’s. Reagan Alzheimer’s was interfering with his ability to remember accurately and separate the facts of his life from the fiction of his movies. I suspect a similar problem is distorting McCain’s memory.
The most recent controversy is over McCain "rewriting" his prisoner of war experiences. During Saturday night’s Saddleback religion discussion, McCain told a story about one of his prison guards drawing a cross in the dirt. Of course, the audience went wild.
Fact checkers have shown McCain’s inspirational "cross in the dirt" story is not true. After being released from prison, McCain was interviewed extensively about his captivity. In all those published interviews, McCain never told this story or even a story close to the "cross in the dirt" story. Nor did he ever tell such a story during the next 25 years. The story first appears in 1999 during McCain’s first run for President.
Neuroscientists have learned much about the working of our brains since McCain was a prisoner of war and Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. Brains do not remember the past in the same way a tape recorder or video camera records happenings. Brain memories are always being "edited." Over time, details are lost, added, and modified.
It is now evident that similar to Ronald Reagan’s memory, McCain "borrowed" that story from the Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
On the one hand, I find this encouraging. After Bush-Cheney, I’d hate to think the White House might be under the control of another blatant liar for the next 4 years. While minor memory distortions are not all that worrisome, McCain’s recent cognitive difficulties are something we should be concerned about.
As many have noted, McCain’s "cross in the dirt" story is but one of numerous mental breakdowns. I can understand how his memory of divorce and affairs don’t match the public record (e.g., court documents). Like Clinton, men (and probably women too) tend to "rewrite" their memories of such behavior.
More troubling are McCain’s cognitive difficulties as they relate to issues of national defense and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. McCain regularly confuses Sunni and Shiite and who is on whose side in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Senator Lieberman had to correct McCain on this false claim that Iran (Shiite) was funding al Qaeda (Sunni).
As Bush’s War on Iraq is making clear, the strains of war itself (even without injury or years of torture) can have a devastating impact on a soldier’s mental health. These experiences can lead to inappropriate moments of anger, confusion, and memory loss.
Maybe that is why our deployed soldiers have contributed six times as much to Obama as McCain. In fact, our soldiers are giving more money (5 times as much) to Republican Ron Paul (who also pledges to end Bush’s War on Iraq) as they are giving to McCain. Unlike the TV watching American public, our soldiers in the field realize that five and a half years as a POW does not make you qualified to lead the troops.