You wanna Frey with that?

When I posted a link to The Smoking Gun story about James Frey's book, A Million Little Pieces, I had no idea that my post title would generate as many Google hits as it has, and continues to do. I got a hit from Yahoo Korea from the search term "a man who conned Oprah." Go figure. The story struck me more as a curiosity than anything of substance, like yesterday's wondrous report of green pigs. But I must have been wrong. I was lucky enough to be linked by the NY Times, and still got more hits for the Oprah post than comments about the Alito hearings this week!

Priorities, you know. Renegade writers who sell books by deception are a lot more interesting than selecting a Supreme Court justice. Of course ten, twenty years from now, which one will we remember? But hey! Gimme the Freys and hold the Alitos.

I can't decide if writers are hard up for subjects to address or if there is something I am missing. I see this morning that 3Quarks has picked up a Slate story about the story about the story about the story. (Got that? Slate talks about the story about the book which is a story about the author who is making up stuff about himself who got the attention of Oprah who put his book on her must-read list, which is a story in itself, and the whole bowl of pudding gets stirred up by The Smoking Gun which...you get the idea.) I'm not picking on Abbas, by the way. We report, you decide.

This meme has more wrinkles than the Plame theme. I'm aghast. What's that dirty old line...I don't know whether to shit or go blind. And if that isn't enough, now we have the specter of the whole blogosphere jumping on a bandwagon to lobby for transparency in Washington. I thought at once of the question: Have you stopped beating your wife? No way to argue. Or more to the point, Are you in favor of or opposed to the idea of killing innocent children?

Hmm?

The next step will be the formation of a Blog Citizens' Militia. A well-regulated militia being important to the stability of a free state, no one shall be denied the right to advocate whatever lunatic idea strikes his or her fancy. I have in the past playfully called myself part of the lunatic fringe, but it looks as though I am getting to be part of the mainstream. So if Congress fails to respond to demands from the blogworld to get more transparent, we can apply sanctions for a limited time, after which we will just have to go up there and whip their butts.