But on Sunday, Ansar al-Sunna posted an Internet message saying that it had not killed Corporal Hassoun and that someone had put a phony message on the two Web sites.
It is a measure of the panicked incompetence of the Republicans that Romney, with his dressage horses and his car elevators and his offshore tax shelters, is an almost comically poorly-chosen messenger for the "Trump is a phony" message.
Two hundred phony tactical messages, warnings of chemical attacks, and intelligence were fed to the men in the room.
Another is a teasingly complex tangle where two former lovers, one American and one French, are reunited by a series of phony double messages that end up getting both of them aboard the hijacked flight.
Of course, if there is any place in the world where everyone knows how phony those messages are, it's Hollywood, where talent often counts for little or nothing, everyone believes in himself with equal, Deepak Chopra-induced passion, and dreams are routinely trampled underfoot.
In the several weeks that I've been speaking with Jason, he didn't strike me as the type to make up a story this elaborate, let alone create and backdate a series of phony text messages.
American culture, having had its higher ambitions whittled down most notably during those years to appeal to the supposed tastes of the profligate and thick browed herd doesn't extol symphonies but Sim phonies, perpetuating messages which teach us that it's okay, indeed preferable, to be downright mediocre.
If we play along with the phony "democracy" message being offered by the anti-Employee Free Choice Act crowd, trying to form a union via secret ballot election would be like trying to run for a seat in Congress but not being given equal access to call the voters, mail them campaign literature, or talk with them face-to-face.
The most common frauds were fake e-mail messages and phony Web pages, and the crimes were organized from the United States, Britain, Nigeria, Canada, Romania and Italy, according to an F.B.I. report issued last month.
