Four of the fake incidents were tainted by essential truths. Lieberman did rebuke President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Cheney did rebuke Sen. John Ker

Four of the fake incidents were tainted by essential truths. Lieberman did rebuke President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Cheney did rebuke Sen. John Kerry for mentioning Cheney's lesbian daughter, though not until well after the vice presidential debate. Bush was in Crawford during Hurricane Katrina. And Republicans did distribute a Jeremiah Wright ad. These truths may have confused some of our subjects. But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together. Actually this one has a genuine incident with which it might have been confused as well. There was a several-day controversy during the Presidential campaign about whether Obama would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad if he became President. It occupied a large slice of one of the Obama/McCain debates. Obama's position that he would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad "without preconditions" was controversial and widely debated. So one might easily misremember that controversy as a controversy about a real, rather than hypothetical, meeting. (In fact the meeting that Obama promised he'd be willing to attend never occurred, but I'm not sure whether this was because Obama changed his mind or whether Ahmadinejad turned out not to have any desire to meet anyway.)