"Mistakes Were Made"

As usual, the Times (today, March 14) gets it half-right, describing the corrupt and malign Attorney-General's admission that "mistakes were made" as a "non-apology." Actually, it's a lot worse than that: it's an expression, not a repudiation, of the corruption and malignity. A "mistake" occurs when you try to do something right and get it wrong: 27 + 26 = 52. That's a "mistake." But in the White House and the Attorney-General's Office no one was mistaken. They wanted to corrupt the Justice Department and they succeeded in doing so. That's not a mistake, it's an accomplishment. This is like saying that an Administration that succeeded in taking a nation to a War that it desperately wanted, and embedding its quest for tyrannical rule in one institution after another, was "incompetent." (See my blogs of January 30th and February 28th). The mistake, of course, was in being careless and thus being caught out.