WELL,THIS MUST BE EMBARRASSING FOR SOME PEOPLE:

There’s been a ton of buzz on the web for the last day or so — beginning with this Daily Kos diary — suggesting that John McCain patterned his story about a Vietamese captor drawing a cross in the dirt before him on a similar episode from Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s time in the Soviet gulags.

But it turns out that this episode probably never happened to Solzhenitsyn at all, and according to a Solzhenitsyn biographer it appears nowhere in his published writing.

The rowbacks are commencing. The desperation, however, remains palpable.