A Rating System for Apologies?

Tiger Woods managed to take center stage today. He even made the stock market blink.

Yes, the all too public apologia of this professional golfer was even able to upstage the Justice Department's seismic announcement that it's going to let former Justice Department lawyers and architects of the "torture memos," Jay Bybee and John Yoo, walk away from criminal indictment.

Moreover, the longest mea culpa in recent memory also deflected media attention away from alleged nuclear proliferation in Iran, the ravages of an earthquake in Haiti, and the upcoming presidential announcement on health care reform.

Frankly, anyone able to watch more than four minutes of the live footage deserves my vote about as much as any other Roman at the Colisseum, but where are the Christians? Oh, that's right, they're busy loading their guns, and preparing for rifle practice, I mean, midterm elections.

Arguably, the only thing more absurd than Woods's completely unnecessary mass media act of self-flagellation may have been watching cable news pundits rate his apology.

One couldn't help but imagine what might have happened if the judges, and juries who presided over infamous Salem Bay witch trials had a rating system for confessions of a bunch of confused women who merely wanted to say whatever they had to, so they could go home to their families. It might not have been necessary to burn witches at the stake, after all. Instead, the witches would simply self-immolate in a flash of mortification that might almost make us all believe they really did die for our sins.