Thursday, January 27, 2011

Let me take this opportunity to apologize...........


Americans are very forgiving people...to a fault actually. We've all made mistakes and had to correct ourselves. We just naturally have sympathy and empathy for those unfortunates who have a very high profile and say something they regret or have to recant. All we ask is that you own up to what you have done. If you lied, tell us, we'll probably give you another chance before we classify you as a habitue of prevarication.

Having said this, why is it that whenever a public figure gets caught in an outright lie they want us to believe that they just "misspoke". Or worse yet, they insult our intelligence that we just "took it out of context". Come on folks, I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night! So, to help these these misguided pundits, I hereby post the definitions of two words from two different online dictionaries.

Lie: verb; 1. tell an untruth; pretend with intent to deceive.
                2. to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.

Misspeak: verb; 1. pronounce a word incorrectly.
                          2. to speak (as a word) incorrectly.

The most recent example of this (and it happens in both liberal and conservative camps) is celebrity journalist Mike Evans. As part of an interview about his "on the road with Mike Evans" show he said he spoke with the Governor of Hawaii about the lack of a birth certificate for Obama when in fact he spoke only with the hospital. He lied. He did not mispronounce the Governor's name. He didn't confuse "Governor Abercrombie" with the word "hospital". He didn't misspeak, he lied. Now he is all apologetic and "embarrassed" that we, the unclean and ignorant, may have gotten the impression that he spoke directly with the Governor about it. Well, duh, that's what you said!

This is only the most recent of so many examples of this from all walks of life; from sports to politics to news reporting. It's classic backtracking after you have been caught in an untruth. Blame it on the people that heard it, not yourself. Aren't you tired of people saying they're sorry "if" they were misunderstood, when you know they were trying to get away with it?

And apologies these days are a joke unto themselves. Can anyone actually say anymore, "I offended or hurt you and I am sorry to you personally"? It doesn't seem so. It's always "I regret if anyone might have taken offense at my remark". Wow, talk about humble pie! I think what they're saying is that it's a real shame that we are so stupid that we don't see the wisdom of what they said and are so sensitive that we just couldn't see that the insult was intended to help us become better people. And some of us are so dumb we don't even know if it was offensive or who among us is offended!

Well, anyway, if you don't see that this is one of the most insightful posts ever, then you're not as intelligent as I thought. Oh, and I regret it if any of you might have found that previous sentence offensive.





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