Go figure. Alberto Fernandez, a senior US State Department official, is fluent in, of all tongues, Arabic. By virtue of his unexpected linguistic aptitude, Sr. Fernandez landed an interview on al-Jazeera in which he let slip that in his esteemed judgment, “the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to… arrogance and stupidity by the United States.” “Failure in Iraq, “ he added, “is a disaster for the region.” An embarrassed State Department quickly dispatched spokesman Sean McCormack, who refuted the Arab network by suggesting, “it is not an accurate quote.” To its decided disadvantage, the stuffy British Foreign Office could not bring itself to employ the now battle tested decoder ring defense when Chief of the General Staff General Richard Dannatt averred that the Brits “should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems.” Recalling that whole Mission Accomplished business, Dannatt predicted, “history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, based more on optimism than sound planning.” If only the General had uttered his missive in obtuse Cockney collocation or unintelligible Jordy gibberish; but when it the Queen’s English all around there is simply nothing redactional parsing can do for the moribund Tony Blair.

Over here in the colonies, we, in the main, stick obligingly to the coarse pattern of blaming alcohol and sequestering ourselves in rehab, while the Continentals, at the same time, seem to favor more erudite apologias fashioned from the Tower of Babel. To wit: Russian President Vladimir Putin recently joked about sexual assault charges pending against Israeli President Moshe Katsav during a confab with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: “Greetings to your president. What a powerful man he turns out to be! He raped 10 women. We all envy him.” Dmitry Peskov was summarily tasked with damage control: “Yes, these remarks were made, indeed. It’s a joke in Russian that actually does not reflect the automatic translation into English.” Perhaps more hilarious is the notion that only days after conducting a nuclear test, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il contritely told a Chinese delegation, “Sorry about the nuclear test. We have no plans for additional tests. If the U.S. makes some concessions to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree, whether it be bilateral or six-party talks.” After the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved economic sanctions against Pyongyang, Chinese Foreign Ministry apparatchik Liu Jianchao declared, “These reports are inaccurate. I haven’t heard Kim apologizing.” In terms of the sanctions, offered Liu, “If other countries impose more pressure, [he] may take further steps.” North Korea went on to warn the South directly that joining the U.S. led embargo would lead to a “crisis of war.” Sorry, indeed.

Even pop star Madonna has suffered from the vagaries of idiomatic alchemy. The Material Girl endeavored to one up fellow single-moniker icon Bono and bestow upon Africa more than the trifles of sovereign debt relief and subsidized anti-viral drugs. Laudably, she went to Malawi to offer herself as surrogate mother to a black orphan. I guess the thousands of crack babies in Newark and Miami weren’t good enough, but in any event across the world she flew to the Lipunga orphanage only to discover that one-year-old David Banda indeed has a father. No matter, Madonna was nonetheless able to push an adoption through the courts despite protestations from international human rights organizations and Yohane Banda alike. “I cannot read,” admitted the distraught paterfamilias, “so I relied on what the [government] officials told me that the papers said; Madonna would look after the child the way the orphanage planned to educate him and then he comes back to me. I see no reason why my child should be given away forever. What we agreed [was in no way adoption, only] that she looks after my child until he finishes school.” I think there’s a word that describes a rich white Westerner plunging headlong into the deepest, darkest recesses of Africa for the purpose of deracinating a native from his village, cutting him off from his culture and dragging him across vast oceans under the yoke of subjugation. What’s that word, again? Oh yeah, slavery.

Unshackled by American custom, President Bush has adopted the continental proclivity of word shifting. Kind of like Carlos Castaneda meets Noah Webster. After telling George Stephanopoulos that his administration has “never been about stay the course” in Iraq, Mr. Bush stridently disavowed the 1,473 times he publicly pledged to “stay the course” during the past three years. Witness that as recently as August 17, White House mouthpiece Tony Snow declared, “you cannot be a president in a wartime and not realize that you’ve got to stay the course.” Of course Snow also circumlocuted that Cheney’s “no brainer” comment on water boarding was “taken out of context.” Perhaps, then, George Wallace’s “segregation forever” pledge was taken out of context, too. At any rate, only two weeks later, on August 30, W. told a Salt Lake City audience: “If we leave the streets of Baghdad before the job is done, we will have to face the terrorists in our own cities. We will stay the course.” After being confronted with videotape of the Utah speech, Mr. Bush quipped, “that wasn’t me; I never said that.”

If only defrocked Congressman Mark Foley could so easily purge the body of concupiscent text messages that flowed from his Blackberry. But, instead, Mr. Foley passed the buck to his former priest, Anthony Mercieca. Given the inherent similarities between anal beads and rosaries, conflating Jesus and a tight, young derriere seems almost unavoidable. Indeed, Rev. Tony admitted in an interview that he and the young Foley shared Greco-Roman saunas and nude massages and that he touched the then teenage boy “maybe once.” Mercieca expounded: “It’s not something you call, I mean, rape or penetration or anything like that.” The following day, however, the cleric issued a statement from his Maltese sanctuary, describing the various published iniquities as “exaggerated.” Remember, if we allow Bill Clinton to claim he somehow smoked without inhaling, it’s only fair that we let Mercieca assert he sucked without swallowing.

The larger issue, of course, is the fact that Archdiocese of Miami shuttled Rev. Anthony Mercieca through eight Florida parishes in his three and a half decades of service – a pattern that virtually signifies the Church’s overt suspicion of pedophilia. Not so, harrumphed the Archdiocese’s Mary Ross Agosta: “I can tell you there are no other allegations against him, there never has been. So the fact that he was transferred around is not because of claims of misconduct.” On the other hand, attorney Jeffrey Herman says his client, now 40, was also molested by Mercieca when he was about 12 years old. “He had been thinking about it… when Foley came out, he decided to come forward.” Herman continued, “He performed oral sex on the boy. He attempted on another occasion following altar boy practice, but the boy declined… and he never went back to the church after that.” I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of all these priests molesting little boys and then getting a slap on the wrist or maybe a year or two in the pokey. Why don’t we start nailing them to large wooden crosses and prop them up, bleeding and begging for mercy, near busy intersections or at shopping malls during the holiday rush? Maybe then we’ll remember what Christmas is supposed to be about.