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HOLIDAY IN FIJI
A widely circulated e-mail, forwarded innumerable times to many reporters, contains a long, first-person narrative of John McCain behaving extremely badly on a holiday to Fiji before his first run for president, insulting his fellow vacationers with a range of behaviors, the mildest of which was insisting that they listen to him read aloud from the works of William Faulkner.
The e-mail came with the telephone number and name of a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and McCain's foes urged reporters to call her.
But as the urban legends clearinghouse Snopes reported, it turned out that the professor hadn't written the e-mail, she only forwarded it.
Another woman's name has since been attached to the email; she has not responded to Politico's calls seeking comment. And even the editor of the left-wing newsletter CounterPunch, no admirer of McCain's, had second thoughts about the story.
"We posted it and then pulled it off after two hours," said CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn. "There seemed to be enough intimations that it's a phony."
"Every time we got the story there seemed to be one degree of separation from [the apparent author], and then she got into seclusion and we couldn't find her," he said.
Cockburn also said details of the story rang false.
"Faulkner was a huge problem," he said. "Hemingway, yes. But would he really read Faulkner?"