(It's redundant, I know).

Fred Barnes tells a charming story about Michael Moore in the Weekly Standard:

A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who's now promoting an anti-President Bush movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he'd gotten the goods on me, indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he'd once been "forced" to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined "on and on about the sorry state of American education," Moore said, and wound up by bellowing: "These kids don't even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!"

Moore's interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. "Fred," he quoted himself as saying, "tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are." I started "hemming and hawing," Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: "Well, they're . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine, you got me--I don't know what they're about. Happy now?" He'd smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse.

Now, I've never read any of Michael Moore's books, so I'd never heard of this passage before. But I mean, come on, I've rarely read a less believable lie in print*. Seriously: does any educated adult not know enough about the Odyssey and the Iliad to fool Michael Moore? That anyone could read that and not say (of Michael Moore) "this guy is simply full of shit" had to be stupid.

*My favorite distortion, however, is in Al Franken's Lies book (which I have read) in which he goes on for a page about how Ann Coulter claimed that Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas is former Socialist Party Presidential candidate Norman Thomas' son. He even goes so far as to print a little bit of an interview with Thomas which makes it appear as though there was no connection at all and Coulter simply came to the conclusion because they've both got the last name "Thomas." Of course, as it turns out, Evan Thomas is Norman Thomas' Grandson. All of this, by the way, comes amid a chapter wherein Franken attacks Coulter at length for taking quotes out of context.