Speaking of Hole Digging...

Terry has noted repeatedly that Joe ("I hate Princeton. Wait, I love Princeton. Wait...") Biden would probably be best off not digging any further, as he's close to hitting oil down there. Not far enough, unfortunately, to fall into the Earth's Mantle, but far enough.

I had a similar thought about Oprah Winfrey. I'm neither fan nor foe of the Afternoon TV Queen, though what I've heard of her politics is not promising. However, I do think she too would be well advised to cease & desist her subterranean excavating. As this article reports, Ms. W is defending her boy, James Frey, the writer of what sounds like a useless piece of tripe, A Million Little Pieces.

The Smoking Gun, which I think is actually a tremendous benefit to society in puncturing the egos and discovering the truth about the celebutante culture, has a huge section basically shredding Frey into A Million Little Pieces, demonstrating fairly well that the guy's true millieu is Bovine Byproducts. The great part about the modern world is that documentation is relatively easy to find & produce if you have the resources & energy to find them. I frankly believe TSG - their documentation, no matter how sordid, is usually spot on.

Here's a place where I think Ms. W would be well served to shut her yap. Say nothing, say you believed the story to be true and you want to see how it plays out, or say "no comment." If it turns out you got snookered, wait until it's clear and say "look, I'm sorry, we thought the book was real, we got fooled, we'll try not to let it happen again." The woman has an amazing influence on the reading habits of America. For her to move from the classics of literature to this tripe is kind of awful to begin with. To defend the guy after all this explodes is not smart. Stop digging.

You know what else? If the guy had just written the book as fiction, there wouldn't be any problem at all. He could've said something like "parts of this are based on my own experience, parts on the experiences of people I knew, but it's a work of fiction." And who'd argue with him? I don't want to read the thing - it sounds awful, real or imagined. But as a work of fiction, there's nothing to complain about - it's simply his ideas on paper. But if you call it a nonfiction book, and you made most of it up? That's just dishonest, and the guy deserves to fall on his face.