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Draining the Fever Swamps

6:54 PM, Aug 19, 2008 • By JOHN MCCORMACK
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Lefty bloggers are slowly beginning to climb down from their accusation that John McCain fabricated or pilfered the story of a prison guard drawing a cross in the dirt while he was a POW. One hypothesis--that McCain ripped off the story from The Gulag Archipelago--has been debunked. Turns out the cross-in-the-sand story never appears in any of Solzhenitsyn's work.

Also, Ross Douthat has a good response to Andrew Sullivan's intense speculation on the subject. Douthat notes that the obsession with the cross-in-the-sand story treads awfully close to the sort of feverish speculation on Obama's connections to Islam that Jerome Corsi engages in (and, I might add, Corsi's unsubstantiated suggestion that Obama dealt drugs).

It is, of course, possible that Andrew's suspicions are justified and McCain invented (or at the very least seriously embellished) the story to pander to the dread Christianists; all sorts of things are possible when you're dealing with a story that almost by definition can't be corroborated. But if this is the standard we're establishing, it's also possible that Jerome Corsi is right when he insinuates that Barack Obama is deliberately concealing the extent of his childhood exposure to Islam in order to maintain his political viability. After all, who can really say?

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