MY BAD (aka "Hea Culpa) by Steve Nadis
As is well known to 49.7 percent of this nation, our president has a hard time admitting an error. During the debates last fall, the only mistake he owned up to was being "too perfect." Perhaps he's right. Maybe that is his only fault. But my eyes, riddled as they are with blepharitis, see things differently. I don't see "dead people." But I do see errors of judgment, omission, commission, fact, folly, and jurisprudence. Thus it came as a great relief to me when last week our true leader, El Jefe, otherwise known as the Veep, the Dick, or Haliburton's best friend, decided to fess up to a little booboo--a bit of a "miscalculation," as he put it. Yes, Cheney admitted, we "overestimated" the pace of recovery in Iraq. (Can a pace have a negative sign? How do you define "recovery"? And what do you mean by "is"?) But he said, it wasn't our fault. We just didn't realize how bad Saddam Hussein was until we rescued him from that poor excuse for a rathole we found him curled up in. Saddam left the country in a worse mess than we could have ever known about until we liberated him. So, yes, the administration did make a mistake (if you want to be a nitpicker about it). But their only mistake was in not realizing how bad that evil madman of a fiend of a travesty of a mockery of a delusion truly was. That comes as a shock to me. Because for years I'd heard he was the devil incarnate himself. I thought that was supposed to be pretty bad, though I admit to not being as experienced with the devil as the men in the White House. But now our enlightened leaders tell us Hussein was far worse than that. The devil incarnate is not the half of it. And, when you get down to it, our mistake is really his mistake. Call it a "Hea Culpa."
