After meeting Jordan's King Abdullah, [President Bush] said: "I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families."  Yesterday, this newspaper attempted to mock president Bush's appearance on Arab-language TV by suggesting that if he were to offer an apology for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, that he would weasel out of it with some form of non-responsibility-accepting formulation.  We were, of course, right - as we invariably are, except for the whole "Pope to rejoin NBA" story. Nonetheless, photographs are now emerging showing clear signs that the English language was abused in yesterday's edition.  In our article yesterday, we speculated that Bush would use the "passive tense."  The correct phrase is, of course, "passive voice," the all-purpose blame-deflecting usage so beloved of the spineless, the spinners, and the husband with lipstick on his collar.  The editorial staff of Muskrat News is sincerely sorry that anyone noticed this mistake, and hopes that no more evidence of such abuses comes to light.  There.  What do you mean, that was a correction, not an apology?  We clearly and specifically apologized for being caught.  What more do you want?  An apology for our actions?  What actions?  We didn't abuse the language.  The story did.  Did we write it?  Well, that's a tricky question, calling for a long-Rumsfeldian kind of answer... we work in an office where articles are sometimes written.   Some of those articles are published, and some are checked for grammar, spelling, and content.  Sometimes the same article is both published and checked.  Was that article checked?  Well, Golly Gee, that's just asking the same question, isn't it?  All we can say is that in any organization of this size, there will be procedures in place to make sure things get done, procedures to make sure that they get done right, procedures to make sure that other procedures are followed.  Now you're asking us which particular procedure wasn't followed.  How can we possibly answer that?  You stand there and say you don't trust our internal processes, and then that you want us to follow those processes to determine the source of an error?  You can't have it both ways! Clearly, the wrong phrase worked its way into our text!  Norms were violated!  Standards were lowered!   We can't be any more specific, because of the literally hundreds of people involved in the editorial process.  Could have been one of the interns.  Also, we think we saw a one-armed man hanging around the linotype machine last night.  Certainly it's not the editor-in-chief's fault. Our State Departmetn correspondent wants you to know that Colin Powell was against any refernce to linguistic devices, and specifically urged us to 'remember it's the passice voice, not tense.'  The Secretary of State also eats all of his vegetables. Nor can it be blamed on the author of the article, who has the complete confidence of the Editor-in-Chief.  Calls for the author's firing are premature.  We have complete confidence in his ability to overcome his congential inability to proof read his own text, and once his work-release program is completed, we look forward to employing him on a paid basis.  Calls for the resignation of the Editor-in-CHief are simply mutinous and will not be tolerated. Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product. The rest is the fakey part. Home                                                                                                     Previous Lines of the Day