Was this past Sunday's "Doonesbury" -- which had George W. Bush defending the burning of Yale University fraternity initiates with a brand in 1967 -- fact or fiction?

"Totally fact-based," replied Garry Trudeau, in response to an E&P e-mail query. "Bush's comment in panel seven is a direct quote, which is why I put it in quotation marks. In the original Yale Daily News expose, we ran a photo of a pledge's seared backside."

According to a 1967 NY Times article, "The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied a 'hot branding iron' to the small of the back of its 40 new members in the shape of the Greek letter Delta, approximately a half inch wide, appeared with the article." It added that a former president of Delta revealed that "the branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is 'only a cigarette burn.'"