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).