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"Do not mitigate or 'explain' just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness," says Rabbi Lerner. He suggests we ask for "guidance and strength to rectify those hurt and to develop the sensitivity to not continue acting in a hurtful way."
Again, a familiar ring. Think, Joe, about the instruction we both received as Irish "cradle Catholics." Surely you will remember the emphasis on examining one's conscience, confessing, and pledging to "sin no more."
The phrase comes back, clear as a bell; we were to "confess our sins, do penance, and amend our life, Amen." Remember?
And remember how clean we felt at the end of that therapeutic process? I was reminded of that by the gospel reading from John 1, in which Jesus says of Nathaniel: "Here is a true child of Israel; there is no duplicity in him."
Just think of how Nathaniel must have felt.
Joe, you can feel that clean; but one cannot short-cut the process. You must first come clean on your role in greasing the skids for President George W. Bush's war of aggression on Iraq.
I use "war of aggression" advisedly, for that is the term used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to denote "the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole."
There is no getting around that despite the reluctance of church, state and the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to acknowledge it.
I imagine that you, as a lawyer, have moments of acute shame over our country's flouting of international law and the U.N. Charter, duly ratified by the Senate and thus the law of the land.
And there is no getting away from the important role you played in roping Congress into facilitating that war.
Were the war not to have killed, injured, displaced hundreds of thousands, your lame circumlocutions regarding your own culpability would be laughable on a par with, say, some of the recent comments of your rival for vice president. But they are in no way funny.
Fulsome Prose
For my own penance, I made myself read again through your marathon, "in-depth" interview with the late Tim Russert on April 29, 2007. Your remarks are notable for two things: (1) periodic sentences that can be diagrammed only by a German philologist with the patience of Job in waiting for verbs and with a deep tolerance for dangling participles; and (2) lies.
It is not hard to spot the lies half-hidden in the underbrush of euphemism and circumlocution.
I do not refer to relatively harmless ones like your firm denial of any interest in running for vice president. I'm talking about the real whoppers the ones we used to call mortal sins.
Despite the goings-on in Washington in recent years, Joe, I don't believe anyone has actually passed legislation revoking the commandment against false witness. It's time you come clean.
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