| Thursday, July 14, 2005 |
11:14 - I'm sorry, all right... sorry I ever came back here
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php?URL=http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/23493/
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Memo to Dick Durbin, Juan Cole, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Ward Churchill, David Ahenakew and anyone else who thinks an "apology" means saying "I'm sorry if my comments offended anybody" or "I'm sorry some people are so petty as to demand that my numbers be accurate": this is how it's done.
This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong ... I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam’s killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. The massacre of the Kurdish Barzani tribe in 1983 killed at least 8,000; the infamous gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed 5,000 in 1988; and seized documents from Iraqi security organizations show 182,000 were murdered during the Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, also in 1988 ...
My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.
I've said it before: the ability to say "I'm sorry" or "I was wrong," directly and honestly and without couching it in a veiled slap at the vindicated accusers or professing wounded moral rectitude, is an important life skill that very few people seem to learn. Phony, unrepentant apologies are a stupid way to get people to like you—and that goes for politicians as well as bloggers and journalists and everybody else. If you own up to your mistakes, people will respect you better than if you obfuscate and try to convince everyone you were right all along. Especially if you're so demonstrably, spectacularly mistaken.
Whatever Molly Ivins' faults, she's so far beyond all the above-listed crocodile-tear-drippers she's lapped them twice.
Via Tim Blair.
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Brian Tiemann
