Yesterday the Smoking Gun revealed that James Frey’s best-selling story of addiciton and general bad behavior, A Million Little Pieces, was, alas, mostly fiction. (In a follow-up piece in today’s New York Times, Frey was quoted as defending his blurring of the old truth and other line by putting himself in the tradition of Hemingway, Henry Milller and Kerouac — though those gentlemen all called themselves writers of fiction.) This moment of epiphany has led me to my own moment of confession.

As readers of my own non-fiction know, I have laid bare many of my own dark secrets in print. Drug abuse, alcoholism, wearing white socks with black shoes — I’ve done it all, baby. But there is more. A lot more.

You’ve probably been reading about that outbreak of bird flu epidemic in Turkey. Turns out those kids were playing with a chicken head, which gives you some idea of what the athletic department of your average Turkish school is like. But the sad truth is that I gave them that chicken head. Even though I knew it wasn’t feeling very well.

If you want to know who decided to restart the nuclear program in Iran, you need look no further. I was carrying yellowcake — not uranium, mind you, just a simple yellow cake, with chocolate frosting — across the border. (I had bought it in Nigeria from Joseph Wilson.) Some imam grabbed it and said, “Great, now we can dominate the world and destory Israel! Though not in that order.”

And those Scottish golfing trips Jack Abramoff took Tom Delay and others on? Check out the dude in the tartan plaids. And stop trying to look up my kilt.

Watch this space for further revelations. For now, suffice to say that in Florida back in 2000 I fronted a band called the Swinging Chads.

It’s all connected.

I was in the kitchen at my wife’s parents apartment in Sanibel on New Year’s Eve, making lasagne for the masses, when my father-in-law said something from the living room about Iran hiding nuclear weapons. Was this breaking news, I wondered? What was his source?

“It’s some guy on Fox News,” he said.

I was going to say something about his unreliable source — my father-in-law was in the newspaper business his entire life and not a gullible man, though he did vote for Bush, twice — when I bit my tongue. I was getting my New York Times delivered to me in Florida over vacation to stay hooked up to my own favored information stream and I realized, with some chagrin, that credibility wise, the Times was in danger of heading into the No Spin Zone.

WMD in Iraq? Oops. Anything by Jason “Burning Down My Master’s House” Blair? Fiction. And now it turns out the paper sat on the story of Bush authorizing illegal wiretaps in the US for over a year — because the White House asked them to. And the only reason they finally ran with it after all, according to the LA Times, was because one of the reporters on the story, James Risen, was about to come out with a book that would scoop the NYT. I say “according to the LA Times” because the NYT, after trying on the mantle of transparency in the wake of the Judith Miller fiasco, has clammed up, even shutting their own ombudsman out on their mysterious reasons for sitting on a story that might have changed the course of the last election.

Who knows? Even my sometimes skeptical father-in-law might not have pulled the lever for GWB if he knew he had circumnavigated the Consitution like Nixon. The Times has deprived me of the right to make fun of Fox News, a sad development indeed.

We spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day in Sanibel, Florida with my wife’s family, biking, beaching, birding. At least some of us were engaged in those activities. Flu laid a few of my nieces and nephews low and in their recovery time they came to know and memorize an infomercial for Scratch and Dent World, a discounted appliance store near Ft. Meyers where you could save a ton o’ money on scratched and dented refrigerators, stoves etc. Though I never saw the ad myself, my daughter’s impression of Lee, who wore a miniskirt and a knee brace, as if to prove some point, stays with me.

I was spending much of my time on my cell phone, dealing with twin family crises. My son had arrived from SF just before Christmas and seemed to be having a kind of meltdown before we boarded the plane. It turned out he had neglected to bring the right amount of medication with him (he takes a host of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs, none of which seem to work particularly well) and though 21, a host of parental figures rallied to get him what he needed even as he repaid us with the gratitude we have come to expect, ie none).

Just before the plane left JFK I learned that my father had entered the ICU in Barstow, CA the night before, complaining of shortness of breath. He was hooked up to a ventilator for a few days even while my older brother and sister and one of my step-sisters drew straws to see who would go down there and deal with him. My father’s popularity with my younger brother and sister is like unto Stalin’s with the Russian Jews. So no straw-drawing there. I am somewhere in the middle, being the middle child, thinking I would find a way to Southern California if my dad was actually dying but not if he surprised everyone for the umpteenth time and lived to fight (and I do mean fight) another day.

And so he did. On the fourth day he sat up, pulled out the breathing tube and demanded some ice cream. My step-sister fled, handing over the feeding and caring of his dogs to my older brother who deserves candidacy for sainthood, given the abuse he has suffered from the old man over the years. Now Dad is in a convalescent hospital and scheduled to be released soon…unless his health goes the other way. My son, too, has righted himself — enough to be civil, enough to acknowledge he needs some help. Battered but not completely broken.

Hence Scratch and Dent World.

I took a break from watching Danny Kaye in the Court Jester (“The chalice from the palace holds the brew that is true”) to watch our own court commander on Sunday night. He was not so much in a jesting mood; between trying to talk tough about the Patriotic Act and his decision to spy on Americans without oversight from the courts and his insistence that everything was going great in Iraq, he didn’t have much time to make with the jokes.

Not that he doesn’t like them. Witness his bizarre double-take at the press conference the next day when he said that in most democracies people find out who won the election the next day. Ooops! Don’t want to remind people of the Florida fiasco. Then there was that funny business with his executive order forbidding two-part questions, and how about the face he made when the door wouldn’t open in China last month? It would have been really funny if he had walked through it and never come back. But then the Chinese would have a lot of explaining to do.

No, these days GWB can’t kid with the public. He has to sound tough about spying on our citizens and he takes on the air of one telling fairy stories when talking about Iraq. But he does not sound wise and paternal; his manner is glib and perfunctory, not like your dad but like your babysitter’s skeezy boyfriend who is reading a story to you while nursing a beer and hoping you go to sleep, pronto, so he can mess around. Makes you want to stay awake to see what kind of shit he’s going to try. Suspicious, but not funny.

Danny Kaye, he was funny.

Our president gave yet another speech on Iraq today and spelled out why we should be so optimistic about the war there: while 2140 American lives have been lost, over 30,000 Iraqis have been killed by US troops. That’s a better than 10:1 kill ratio, which should be cause for great rejoicing in this holiday season. (Sorry: Christmas season.)

For Bush, raised on the WWF and Rambo, it should not seem surprising that we are killing ten insurgents for every one of our servicemen. Our guys can fire two machine guns at once, spinning in a circle, while ninja-like Arabs traditionally fall to the ground screaming, “Aaargh!” Unless they are blown out of the frame by a massive explosion, in which case they usually yell, “Aieee!”

In other words, bring ’em on. Except those 30,000 were civilians…

Meanwhile, the Democrats have demonstrated their ability to seize the moment, take advantage of discord over the war, by circling the wagons as in a John Ford western, allowing the GOP to play Indian for a change. It’s just that their playbook needs some work.

“Okay, Murtha, I want you to go over there and set yourself on fire. Dean, stay back and gnash your teeth and moan. Pelosi, get up on top of the wagon and scream hysterically. And Lieberman, I want you to go out there and join the other side. And don’t come back until everyone of us is dead!”

We’re all doomed. Civilians included.