He lied. Blatantly, repeatedly, publicly, and quite profitably. And he didn't just lie about his life - he lied about his recovery from a serious drug addiction. What he said was powerful enough to enter the public consciousness, which means that in the future, people trying to recover from drug addictions are going to have to not only work their way through their own lies, but also through the lies he has laid over them. How many parents won't send their kids to recovery programs because of lies this man told? How many people won't seek help to recover from their addictions because this man told them that they could do it on their own? I'm proud of Oprah for slapping him down. I only wish we could find some way of making him give all of his ill-gotten profits to charity.

Oprah is an insufferable soapbox whore. She, after all, is the most vehement promoter of Dr. Phil, a huckster if there ever was one. Who cares if the facts are all true in this book? Does anyone really think all the minute details of A Moveable Feast are word for word accurate to a tee? A Boy's Life was the accurate video replay of a 10year old child's miserbale beginnings? Not likely. Ok, so certainly, the author should be reprimanded and certain account be taken, but if everyone thinks any memoir they purchase is ever so accurate, they kinda slow.

I wish the American public would get this mad every time Bush lies about pot.

But that was a lie most people were okay with ignoring at the time.

Sometimes the public won't tolerate lies, and sometimes that's all they'll tolerate.

Right now the official position of the ONDCP is that parents who smoked pot and turned out fine should lie to their kids and say they didn't turn out fine.

In other words the Bush administration wants all parents to make up stories like Frey did. Our official government drug policy is to fake your own substance abuse memoir.

In light of that, how can we really criticize Frey?

The professor's proposal is ridiculous. Publishers are supposed to add "accuracy ratings" to the memoirs they publish to accomplish truth in advertising? A memoir is not journalism, and the story it tells is not news, so why should we be so obsessed with accuracy? A memoir ought to be a literary accomplishment--one that has merit in itself, whether or not the story that it relates really happened in the precise way that the author asserts.

The real problem with Frey's book is not that it's dishonest, but that it's not very good. It needed the veneer of truth to even make it into print. Absent this, it just seems melodramatic and silly. If readers demanded more from their memoirs to begin with, we would have to worry far less about accuracy.

Deborah Howell, Jim Brady, Wolf Blitzer and Katie Couric have all publicly lied. They all claimed that Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats. When caught in their lies, they not only didn't fess up to them, they tried to blame the people who pointed out their lies to them. Deborah Howell and Jim Brady still refuse to admit that Howell merely repeated GOP spin without fact-checking. Wolf Blitzer, when told by Howard Dean that he is wrong, continues to insist he is right. Katie Couric, when told by Dr Dean that she is wrong, takes off her glasses and insists she is right.

They're all wrong and they're deliberately wrong. In trying to paint Abramoff as a bipartisan scandal, they're all lying and they know it.

Let's see them put on a panel and verbally pummeled by truthseekers like Richard Cohen, Frank Rich and Oprah, 'kay? Truth in book publishing is so damned important. Let's make truth in media as important.

I cannot but wonder how Oprah can be so upset about the lies in this book... she has no problem with the faith based "lies" most people choose to believe as the truth. It it works for you, believe it, otherwise read a clearly labeled work of fiction and be happy. I think Frey would have been most wise to have responded to all this by saying that his book is as true as his readers want (or need) it to be.

I think I know why there was "suddenely" an avalanche of investigations into the veracity of Frey's book: He had the temerity to take on the Twelve-Step Cult that has a strangle-hold on addiction recovery in this country. False memoir or no, for that he is to be commended.

As to the clips, I think the key moment comes when he states that Lily didn't hang herself but cut her wrists. Look at his eyes. There is real pain there, at the thought of her killing herself. Oprah's self-serving harruMPHing is ludicrous. When Frey talks - admittedly not very well - about "altering things" in the book, he is describing a perfectly legitimate practice. This was a memoir, people. Memoirs are not supposed to be fiction, but nor are they autobiography or journalism. Nan Talese's defense is thus apt. And I'm willing to bet that the whole "he tried to sell it as fiction" angle is nothing more than the fact that Frey himself (as he has stated in the past) didn't think anyone would believe it was true. Nan Talese, a great editor, didn't buy it as fiction and, I'm guessing, divined the truth. A truth that is now, ironically, being challenged precisely because the author who lived it didn't think anyone would believe it.

What a curiously fucked-up culture we live in.

No memoir can be 100% accurate because memory is not TIVO. Remembering and then putting words to people and events changes them. Just think of any major event in your family history and see how different members will tell the story differently, sometimes wildly so.

But that's not the point. We expect some basic level of accuracy to fact and Frey has been grossly off-base. Okay, he says he was in jail 87 days. If it were two months, 87 days is close enough and approximates the truth. But he was in one night! And so on and so forth.

At the same time, the amount of newsprint this story has gotten is amazing, when we have an administration that lies continually, habitually, needlessly, pathologically. Yet we don't hold our government to as high a standard as the one we're holding Frey to.

Shameful.