Filmmaker and author Michael Moore faked an interview in his first best-selling book "Stupid White Men," according to the purported subject.

Fox News analyst and Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes says the interview never happened.

In his book, Moore wrote he'd once been "forced" to listen to Barnes commenting on the PBS news show "The McLaughlin Group."

Barnes, according to Moore's account, whined "on and on about the sorry state of American education" and wound up by bellowing: "These kids don't even know what 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey' are!"

In an article in the Weekly Standard, the editor then tells his side of the story:

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.

The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar. He made it up. It's a fabrication on two levels. One, I've never met Moore or even talked to him on the phone. And, two, I read both "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" in my first year at the University of Virginia. Just for the record, I'd learned what they were about even before college. Like everyone else my age, I got my classical education from the big screen. I saw the Iliad movie called Helen of Troy and while I forget the name of the Odyssey film, I think it starred Kirk Douglas as Odysseus.

Barnes said he didn't "scream bloody murder" when the book came out in 2001 because he didn't learn about the phony anecdote until it was brought to his attention by Alan Wolfe, who was writing a review of the book for the New Republic magazine.

Wolfe's quote, saying not a word of it was true, was sufficient, Barnes thought at the time.

"After all, who would take a shrill, lying lefty like Moore seriously?"

Barnes answered his question: "More people than I thought."

He noted Moore's new movie attacking Bush, "Fahrenheit 9/11," was given a 20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.

"Moore has described the movie as breaking new ground and revealing new facts, but the accounts by reviewers suggest it merely provides the standard left-wing, conspiratorial critique of the president," Barnes wrote.

He notes reviewer Lou Lumenick of the New York Post, who gave Moore's previous movie "Bowling for Columbine" four stars, said the anti-Bush film would be news only "if you spent the last three years hiding in a cave in Afghanistan."

Still, Barnes wrote, "I suppose it's not surprising they loved it in France."

The film won the Cannes festival's top prize over the weekend.

As WorldNetDaily reported, Moore failed to meet the submission requirements of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when nominating "Bowling for Columbine" for an Oscar. Also, critics of the filmmaker have called on the academy to investigate whether Moore fabricated scenes in the movie.

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