There’s a rumor going around the internet that John McCain stole a story from an Alexander Solzhenistyn book and set it in the Vietnamese prison camp he was held in.

McCain’s been getting a lot of mileage out of his “Christianity-in-captivity” story. It’s been in ads, and speeches, and his talks from the pulpit. And for good reason: It’s extraordinarily affecting. In it, McCain is spending another Christmas Day locked in a Vietnamese prison. A guard walks up to him and, with his foot, etches a cross in the dirt. McCain and his captor stare at the symbol for a moment, before the guard scratches it away and leaves McCain to his thoughts. “To me, that was faith,” says McCain. “A faith that unites and never divides, a faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity.”

What’s peculiar about this story is that, as a DailyKos commentor noticed, it precisely echoes a tale from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:

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.

It’s quite a coincidence. A couple bloggers have started looking for some further evidence that this story actually happened to McCain.

This sounds like a bit of a stretch to me.  Solzhenistyn’s book was published in 1973.  McCain was released from the Hanoi Hilton in March of 1973.  Given that McCain was in pretty serious medical condition upon being released and required a good deal of time to recuperate it seems unlikely that he would have immediately dived into Solzhenitysn’s three-volume discourse on the horrors of Soviet gulags looking for details with which to embellish his own prison camp stories.

And such embellishments hardly seem necessary, no?  McCain’s experiences in those Vietnamese prison camps are sensational enough as they are, so why would McCain feel the need to embellish them?

Plus, as Megan McArdle points out:

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 think that last bit illustrates exactly how this will backfire for the Obama faithful.  Attacking McCain’s POW stories with little or no basis does almost nothing to discredit McCain himself, and a whole lot to make the would-be discreditors look foolish and petty and trite.  If anything, such attacks and smears serve more to endear McCain to those who feel sorry that his tortuous service to this country in Vietnam is twisted so blithely in the name of politics.