Green Day. (Photo by carmenchui)

A Washington Post story about British protesters’ campaign to make the Green Day song “American Idiot” number one on the charts ahead of President Donald Trump’s visit is getting all kinds of attention.

The story quotes liberally from an op-ed by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, in which he admits that former president George W. Bush was the idiot in question.

The only problem?

The op-ed was published by Clickhole, the sister satire site of The Onion, which is known for skewering the conventions of viral headline writing and clickbait, with stories like “More Bad News For Democrats: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Announced She Is Retiring From The Supreme Court To Play Miss Hannigan In A Community Theater Production Of ‘Annie’” and “This Tortoise Is 182 Years Old. So Why Hasn’t He Stopped History’s Greatest Atrocities?“

Other op-eds on the site include one supposedly penned by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, titled “I’m Proud Of President Trump For Replacing The Un-American Practice Of Family Separation With The Profoundly American Practice Of Mass Incarceration.”

In other words, Armstrong definitely did not write that op-ed, which ends with “Well, that’s it from me. Until next time, Greenheads!”

this fuck-up is so pure it makes me weep pic.twitter.com/JOHHioqIAF

— Jon Hanrahan (@hanrahanrahanra) July 10, 2018

The story comes from the Post’s Morning Mix team, which Columbia Journalism Review describes as “aggregator-reporters working an overnight shift to jump on stories generated by newsrooms around the world, and present them to the Post’s readers every morning.”

The mix-up, flagged by Jon Hanrahan on Twitter, isn’t the first time that these satire sites have been quoted as legitimate outlets. Back in 2012, Chinese Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily published a 55-page photo spread with the headline “North Korea’s top leader named The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2012.”

The Washington Post has updated the story with a correction: “This story has been updated to remove material attributed to a satirical web publication, Clickhole, which should not have been treated seriously.”