(update below)

Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain gave a misleading answer to his first Faith Forum question, and so tarnished his entire performance.

As Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren put it to McCain on Saturday, "Now, my first question: Was the cone of silence comfortable that you were in just now?"

McCain answered, "I was trying to hear through the wall" and thus told a charming lie.

His dishonesty first became apparent when NBC News' Andrea Mitchell reported Sunday the Obama campaign's objection that McCain was not secluded.

Affirming Mitchell's account the New York Times' Kit Seelye wrote today:

Senator John McCain was not in a "cone of silence" on Saturday night while his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was being interviewed at the Saddleback Church in California... The matter is of interest because Mr. McCain, who followed Mr. Obama's hourlong appearance in the forum, was asked virtually the same questions as Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain's performance was well received, raising speculation among some viewers, especially supporters of Mr. Obama, that he was not as isolated during the Obama interview as Mr. Warren implied. ...
Mr. Warren, the pastor of Saddleback, had assured the audience while he was interviewing Mr. Obama that "we have safely placed Senator McCain in a cone of silence" and that he could not hear the questions... Interviewed Sunday on CNN, Mr. Warren seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building during the Obama interview.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis confirmed the allegation in a heated letter of protest to NBC. Davis wrote, "The fact is that during Senator Obama's segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed."

Davis was of course protesting Mitchell's report by using the time-honored "seppuku strategy" of affirming the accuracy of the report and then screaming that the accurate and relevant report should not have been aired or published.

McCain's dishonesty regarding "the cone of silence" gave additional force to the allegation that his Saddleback account of Christmas in Saigon was freely adapted from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of his time in the Soviet Gulags.

McCain talked of a Vietnamese prison guard drawing the sign of the cross in the sand (an account which absent from McCain's detailed, 1973 account of his time in North Vietnamese prison, and apparently first emerged in 1999 when his bid for the Republican presidential nomination made it convenient.).

Solzhenitn's strikingly similar account in "The Gulag Archipelago" (published in the U.S. in 1973) is:

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

McCain attends a Baptist Church and certainly knows that actual faith in the way of the Cross requires one to tell the truth about both trivial and important things, not fudge one's account of events three and half decades past. And not fudge one's account of events an hour or so past.

I don't think the right name for those who fudge is "straight shooter."

McCain's behavior in both of these instances appears to have been that of a "hypocrite."

The Baptist Center for Ethics publication Ethics Daily has called Rick Warren out for his failures to tell the truth.

In "How Fast Can Rick Warren Spin," Mark McEntire, an associate professor of religion at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., carefully contrasts the claims Warren made during the Aug. 16 ":Faith Forum" at Saddleback Church with the revelations and admissions which have followed.

McEntire ends with a call for public repentance and abandonment of any plans for future fora:

What I believe is certain is that Warren needs to apologize to the candidates and his audience, first, for not telling the truth, and second, for arguing, after he was caught not telling the truth, that the truth does not really matter.
The first "Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency" was a bad idea from the start, and Warren and his church proved ill-equipped to handle it. Let's hope it was the last.