And While We're on the Subject of Fraud...

Really, I hate to do all this fraudblogging. I'd rather be talking about airplanes! But... well, phonies get my goat. And here's another one. 

Provincetown, Mass.'s director of tourism self-published a novel, a sort of gay-coming-of-age story (if you know Provincetown, the Natural Bachelors ' Riviera, it makes perfect sense). Not, as Seinfeld might say, that there's anything wrong with that. 

Except he let his wishful thinking drive his marketing when he announced to the world and published that he'd been on the Oprah TV show to talk about his book, and it had been selected for her book club. He even posted a transcript of his interview with the daytime-TV host. 

Except, of course, you know where I'm going with this, right? Yep, Oprah Winfrey never heard of this guy or his book, and the closest he ever got to her show was on his side of the TV screen. He made it all up. (No word on whether scouts from The New Republic and the Boston Globe are in a bidding war for him, yet).

Well, when he was busted, he manned up and confessed, right...? Er... no. Not exactly. He made a mealy-mouthed and self-serving statement. "I acknowledge an error in judgment," he stammered out. Error in Judgment? Look, if you button your shirt wrong and have to undo and rebutton it, that's an error in judgment. If you put too much milk in your breakfast cereal. If you have to back up and try parallel parking again, that's an error in judgment. Trying to con the world with a phony credit (and fabricating the supporting evidence to half-assed back it up) is something else entirely. It's of a piece with the lost souls who boast fake military medals or type a bogus Harvard sheepskin onto their resumes. It's pathetic. It's a failure of character. 

A bogus Oprah interview. As the kids say today, that's so gay. 

(Original story from the Examiner after the jump, in case the link goes stale). 

Oprah Book Club claim by Mass. novelist was fictional

Aug 16, 2007 10:29 AM (1 day ago)

AP

PROVINCETOWN, Mass. 

A Cape Cod official admitted he made an "error in judgment" by claiming that his self-published book had been selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club and that he had been interviewed by the talk show diva.

Bill Schneider, Provincetown's administrative director of tourism, even posted a transcript of the purported interview with Winfrey on his Web site, though it later was taken down, the Cape Cod Times reported Thursday.

"Crossed Paths," was self-published by Schneider in March, and recounts the story of two men who fell in love in the 1970s. One later committed suicide.

A spokeswoman for Harpo Productions, Inc., Winfrey's studio, said Schneider never appeared on the show and the book was never listed on Oprah's Book Club.

"I acknowledge an error in judgment, in my attempt to memorialize (in my book) someone very special who didn't get a chance to finish his life," Schneider said.

Information from: Cape Cod Times, http://www.capecodonline.com