Just a couple of days ago, we celebrated George Clooney's brave coming out to the blogosphere, in which the actor used Arianna Huffington's lefty cocktail party to proclaim himself a proud liberal. There's only one problem with Clooney's very public breaching of his blog-cherry: Sure, he said those things that wound up on the Huffngton Post, but to other, MSM sources, and never wrote a blog entry for Arianna. The LAT's Styles & Scenes blog lands the scoop:

"He doesn't object to the quotes," says Stan Rosenfield, Clooney's valiant rep. "He said those things and those are his views. Arianna asked for permission to use the quotes and he gave it to her. What he didn't give permission for was the use of his quotes without source attributions to make it appear that he wrote a blog for her site. Which he did not. When he saw the posting Monday, we called and asked her to make the change, to simply attribute the quotes and make it clear that he did not write a blog. But she refused. And it's now Wednesday."

Rather than keep waiting, Clooney got pro-active and issued this statement:

"Miss Huffington's blog is purposefully misleading and I have asked her to clarify the facts.

I stand by my statements but I did not write this blog. With my permission Miss Huffington compiled it from interviews with Larry King and The Guardian. What she most certainly did not get my permission to do is to combine only my answers in a blog that misleads the reader into thinking that I wrote this piece. These are not my writings - they are answers to questions and there is a huge difference."

Huffington has already responded to the charges on the HuffPo, dismissing ClooneyGate as "an honest misunderstanding":

This was an honest misunderstanding. But any misunderstanding that occurred, occurred between Clooney and the publicist. We based our decision to post on the unambiguous approval we received in writing. There was no room for misunderstanding in that.

We're relieved that (as per usual) a publicist can be scapegoated to resolve an ugly situation. We'd hate to see Huffington's relationship with other Oscar-winners willing to have sound-bites from previous interviews compiled into uninteresting blog posts damaged; it would be quite unfortunate to lose the HuffPo's planned reprinting of Reese Witherspoon's musings on global warming to Seventeen and Redbook over a silly little misunderstanding like this.

• Clooney to Arianna: I Did Not Blog [The Envelope Styles & Scenes]
• Previously: George Clooney Joins Blogosphere, Immediately Outs Himself [Defamer]