Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry
I’m sick of “sorry.”
A colossal string of clusterfucks over the past week triggered a litany of public apologies. As luck would have it, the mea culpas were as bad as the screw ups. The apologies were too late, too vague, or too blatantly insincere to assuage anybody.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Apology is only egotism wrong side out.”
CBS’s 60 Minutes spent a year researching a piece on the Benghazi attacks, only to be duped by a phony eyewitness. After defending her reporting for days, correspondent Lara Logan and her boss, Jeff Fager, made the media rounds of “sorry.”
An apology from 60 Minutes, still the gold standard for TV journalism, is exceedingly rare, so this one should have meant something. It didn’t. Appearing on 60 Minutes Sunday, Logan was long on self-serving platitudes and short on specifics.
The 90-second apology offered no new insights into why CBS had believed security contractor Dylan Davies, who went under the pseudonym of Morgan Jones on the October 27th broadcast. Nor did it reveal any details of CBS’s vetting process.
Trust me, this one’s not over. As with Dan Rather’s career-ending Memogate scandal in 2004, heads will roll at CBS.
On a bigger stage, President Obama also resisted for days before apologizing for the calamitous rollout of Obamacare. As if the website fiasco weren’t enough, millions of Americans were dropped by their healthcare insurers — an occurrence that Obama had repeatedly promised would not happen. “Period.”
Obama didn’t say he was sorry for having misled — some say lied to — the public. He didn’t apologize for his countrymen having lost their health plans. Instead, his contrition was restricted to the fact that Americans were having a hard time signing up for Obamacare. Lame, lame, lame.
Then there was Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, Canada’s answer to ex-Washington mayor Marion “The Bitch Set Me Up” Barry. Like Barry, Ford was caught on video smoking crack. After months of denial, Ford finally admitted that yes, he had smoked crack, “probably in one of my drunken stupors.”
No question, Ford would make a great Eagles fan, but he’s no mayor. Or is he? His approval rating went up after his sorrowful admission, proving that our chronically overlooked neighbors to the north are happy with any crumb of worldwide exposure, negative or otherwise.
Last, and certainly least, was Sharon Osbourne, a host on CBS’s The Talk. As a guest on Arsenio Hall’s show, she said that all the gals on rival The View, except Barbara Walters, could “go fuck themselves.”
The following day, she made nice on The Talk, apologizing to her View cohorts. “I’m just really a loose cannon!” she added, displaying a remarkable grasp of the obvious. I’m a loose cannon, too, Sharon! Go fuck yourself. Gee, I’m sorry
Let’s face it, “sorry” is easy. Impulse control is hard. Thoroughly vetting a source is hard. Successfully launching a new national initiative is hard. Easier to fail and say “my bad” than do it right in the first place, no apology required.
So spare me the apologies, will you? I’m sick of “sorry.”
