It's easy to rattle off the big stories of 2005, which was a big-story kind of year: Hurricane Katrina devastates the Gulf Coast. The war in Iraq grinds on, with rising casualties in the desert and rising angst on the home front. White House aides try to keep themselves out of jail, while a reporter checks herself in. London has a bloody appointment with terror. Pope John Paul II departs a world he helped change. Terri Schiavo finally rests in peace. Michael Jackson walks, Kanye West talks, and George W. Bush misplaces his trusty mojo. Maybe he should look in Albuquerque, where they found the Runaway Bride.

I prefer tallying the best stories of the year — the most stunning, the most surprising, the stories you can hardly believe you're reading. Of course, the reason for disbelief is that they're not, strictly speaking, true. They belong to the category journalists have known since time immemorial as "too good to check."

The phrase is self-explanatory: A reporter hears something utterly incredible, spends a glorious hour or so regaling colleagues with the tale, and then reluctantly sits down and dials the phone. One call, maybe two, and the whole story falls apart. You establish, say, that the vice president was definitely in Washington on a particular day — which means that the tipster was wrong, and it couldn't have been the Veep in the middle of that bar fight in Cheyenne.

Sometimes, though, the facts seem so plausible and the sources so credible that the story initially checks out, so everybody runs with it. Weeks or months later, after overlooked facts are noticed and common sense belatedly applied, the "too good to check" diagnosis is made retrospectively.

Hurricane Katrina was a trove of "too good" stories. For example, take the reports of a shocking, deadly shooting rampage by young thugs in what was left of New Orleans. The mayhem was front-page news. But later, when the dead were recovered and autopsied, authorities found no spike in homicides the week after Katrina hit.

Same with the reports that miscreants were shooting at rescue helicopters. People who had spent days stranded on roofs or in attics explained later that they were firing to attract the helicopter pilots' attention, not scare them away.

Science, as usual, provided a bounty of "too good to check" material. I'm not sure any newspaper or magazine actually ran my ultimate headline about the avian flu scare — "We're All Going to Die!" — but that was the general tone of the coverage. It turns out, though, that the H5N1 influenza virus stubbornly refuses to learn how to pass from human to human. Yes, there will be a flu pandemic someday. No, someday doesn't necessarily mean now.

Then there was South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who in May announced that he had produced custom-cloned stem cells for 11 human subjects. Soon, stories reported, doctors would be able to engineer specific medical treatments for any individual, like Bones used to do on "Star Trek." But now it turns out that Hwang fabricated his data. Those lovely bespoke stem cells never existed.

My personal favorite "too good" story of the year didn't fool the newspapers, but it made a big splash on the Internet, which may just be the ideal medium for cultivating believable untruths. With no irony and just the right hint of paranoia, a Web site elaborately "revealed" why comedian Dave Chappelle fled to South Africa just as he was about to cash in on a $50 million television contract.

The site claimed that a cabal of eminences calling themselves the "Dark Crusaders" — the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse L. Jackson and Louis Farrakhan; entertainers Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey; and the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television, Robert L. Johnson — decided that Chappelle's racially charged humor was demeaning to the African American community, so they threatened and harassed him out of town.

The whole thing was soon revealed to be pure, unadulterated fiction. It looks like it might have been a "viral marketing" campaign to generate buzz for two of Chappelle's comedy sidekicks, but the only thing that's really clear is that the story was false.

As the new year dawns, President Bush and the Republican majority in Congress are telling us the nation can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq, tens of billions more on pork-barrel projects, additional tens of billions on Gulf Coast reconstruction — and still keep cutting taxes with a chainsaw, to the benefit of the wealthiest Americans.

And we all just go with the story. Waaaaaay too good to check.

Eugene Robinson is a member of The Washington Post Writer's Group. Reach him at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.