Last week the boss I had for most of last year died of a sudden heart attack. We went to his funeral service yesterday and the church was packed. This was a man who met many people in his too-short life and kept many friends. I only knew him for less than a year but I'm not surprised at how many people came to mourn him. Rest in peace, John Fryer.

Turning to less pleasant activities, today's Oregonian had two articles dealing with the recent spate of memoir-faking. The writers of neither could stay on the topic and resist taking potshots at war in Iraq. Sign of times, these writers apparently believe, that men are making up stories and passing them off as true in order to be published, and presidents are making up stories of mad dictators and their arsenals of proscribed weapons in order to, well, I'm not sure what they really believe is motivating Bush.

One of these articles was written by Steve Duin, one of the paper's regular columnists, specializing in a painfully obtuse moral outrage. Not long ago he wrote about having recently discovered Howard Zinn for the first time; we can safely ignore the accusations of any person who can go through life without, first, hearing of Howard Zinn, and then secondly, quickly dismissing him as the academic fraud he is.

The second article is by a local memoirist named Judith Barrington. Her general thrust is correct, that James Frey "betrayed the trust" of readers. But like Duin she loses the plot when she panders to her compulsion to tie this in with the fraying of society as a whole, particularly when it can be blamed on this administration: "Weapons of mass destruction are claimed as a reason for war but turn out not to exist". Fair enough, though that ignores a decade or more of international attention paid to the problem of Saddam Hussein and his refusal to accede to cease-fire terms he agreed at the end of the Gulf War. Anyway, she continues with "Our president fails to tell us he has bypassed the law in order to spy on American citizens". That is woeful, inane, immature, in so many ways; let us correct it: "Our president rightly declined to broadcast to our enemies that he was using means that his legal advisors had rigorously subjected to an analysis that showed they were well within his inherent powers as president, means designed not to spy on American citizens but to intercept communications with identified terrorists attempting to communicate with elements inside our country, whether foreign or citizens, in order to discover plots that would endanger our people". She finishes her version with "Many of us are outraged but not surprised". Many of you who would say that are assholes but that does not surprise me. Really.

Later on she writes: "We are manipulated, too, by the clever deceptions of speech writers who choose words not for accuracy but to sway public opinion. As Pinter said, "We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'brining freedom and democracy to the Middle East'". Does she intend irony by connecting that first sentence and the second? Probably not. She is as obtuse as Duin when it comes to the reality of the war. To quote Pinter's enumerations of foolishnesses is a foolish act itself. I wouldn't call her a liar but she is definitely a fool.