Delusions... but no grandeur

This weekend's forum with Barack Obama and John McCain at Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church provided three separate incidents which give us some insight into the Arizona Senator's current  state of mind. Although each of these incidents is not particularly important in and of itself, the three of them taken together make one wonder about Mr. McCain's grip on reality -- or perhaps his grip on the truth.

1.  McCain named civil rights icon and US Representative John Lewis (D-GA) as one of the three men he most admires and would consult often on important matters of policy. This revelation came as quite a surprise to Lewis, who told the MotherJones blog that McCain "does not consult me". Hmmm... 

2. At the beginning of his segment with Warren (which followed Obama's), McCain confirmed that he had been in the so-called 'cone-of-silence' unable to hear Warren's questions and the Illinois Senator's answers. He did so by admitting - jokingly - that he had been "listening at the walls".  As we all now know, this was simply untrue. By his own campaign's admission, McCain was in his car on the way to the church for a good portion of Obama's discussions with Warren. To give the impression that he was in fact in the cone of silence, straining at the walls to hear, was disingenuous at best. The excellent website, FiveThirtyEight.com, has an succinct account of this story for those who might have missed it. Double hmmm...

3. Later in his conversation with Warren, McCain recounted a story he has often told about a North Vietnamese guard who drew a cross in the dirt while he (McCain) was a POW in Hanoi. My impression, as I listened to McCain relate this tale on Saturday night, was that it was somehow subtly different, in an oddly disconcerting way, from what I had heard the Arizona Senator say in previous tellings. The story, as McCain was now relating it, sounded very familiar somehow. It was a nagging feeling I had, but I couldn't quite figure out where I had heard or read a very similar story before.  Then, a couple of days ago, I ran across Mark Nicolas' blog on The Huffington Post... and eureka!  Of course! There was an eerily similar scene in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's great work, The Gulag Archipelago. Nicolas' well-researched and thoughtful blog is well worth a read. So, ok, triple hmmm...

Too clever by half? Overly disingenuous? Slightly delusional? I'm not sure, but I do know that these little tidbits from McCain's performance at Saddleback make me very uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.