All of us at one point in time or another have done something we regret and just can’t seem to fix, no matter how hard we try. For example, if you’ve been driving any number of years, you may have accidentally hit someone’s dog or cat that suddenly dashed out in front of your car. You couldn’t stop in time and someone lost their pet. What can you say, except that you’re sorry, but you couldn’t help it. The pain and loss is still there and won’t go away for anyone involved for a long period of time. But you did do the right thing and admit your error with a true sense of remorse and guilt.

Now, in the above instance only an animal was injured or killed, that’s bad enough, and it certainly wasn’t done intentionally.

Now let’s look at the damage Newsweek magazine did the other week when they reported a story about some US serviceman flushing a copy of the sacred Quran down a toilet at the military base in Guantanamo Bay. According to Newsweek, their information came from ‘A knowledgeable US government source’. One, which, they now refuse to identify. In the May 9th edition, they reported that copies of the holy book had been flushed down toilets to entice the prisoners to talk.

Riots have broken out all over the middle east and lives have certainly been lost, not to mention the destruction of property caused by these violent protests.

Newsweek’s apology is about as pleasing as lukewarm spit as they declare that ‘ We regret that we got any part of our story wrong and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the US soldiers caught in its midst.’

What a load of horse hockey. I cannot image for the life of me how anyone with an ounce of integrity could make such a statement with a straight face and truthfully believe what they had said. Surely this person is some hack they hired to make this statement and not some employee of the magazine. I sense absolutely no sense of guilt or remorse from their prepared statement.

Heaven help anyone on the right who might have made such a grievous error. The left wing media would be calling for their heads on a pike and looking for rails to run them out of town on. A congressional investigation would be the order of the day, with someone along the lines of the ‘holier than thou’likes of Senator Kennedy leading the charge of the fright brigade.

Whatever happened to the media ‘reporting’the news’When did we go through a sea change in this country and start allowing the media to ‘make’the news’What happened to the concept of who, what, where, when and how’Don’t they teach that any longer or has that idea been discarded in substitution for ratings and sensationalism’ What kind of message to we portray to the youth of this country when the organizations that are charged with the responsibility of telling us what is going on in the world around us, take it upon themselves to create stories which are handed out with as gospel to the American public’

I find it ironic that the media practically gloats over conservative rights when they get trampled, but will rush to defend anyone else, no matter what the claim happens to be.

If we were to tear up a Bible and flush it down a commode, do you really think the right wing media would report the event, much less make a world wide issue out of it’

Yeah, that’s what I thought.