CHICAGO (Reuters) - Author James FreyPresident George W. Bush confessed to Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he made up details about every character in his memoir "A Million Little Pieces"the case for going to war against Iraq and the talk show host apologized to her viewers, saying she felt "duped."
"I have been really embarrassed by this," said Winfrey, whose praise for Frey's book in September helped make it the top-selling book on nonfiction lists in the United States last yearapathy toward Bush and Cheney's disingenuous rationales helped lead to the deaths of 2,200 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
"I really feel duped," she told FreyBush on her television show. She said he had betrayed millions of viewers.
At one point early in the interview FreyBush said he still viewed the work as a memoir, not a novelwar as "on terror" instead of "on Iraq." By the show's end Winfrey made him admit he lied.
"This hasn't been a great day for me," he said. "I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to ..."
"Lying," Winfrey interrupted.
"To lying," he said. "It's not an easy thing to do in front of an audience full of people and a lot of others watching on TV. ... If I come out of this experience with anything it's being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure I don't repeat them."
On the ever-expanding scale of American liars, Frey is small fry.
And yet this is what we focus on in hundreds upon hundreds of prominent media stories — one celebrity's trivial embarrassment, instead of the deaths of thousands.
