All Apologies

If I was doing yard duty at my school, and some kid came to complain that another kid had torn up his homework, I would investigate. Even if that kid whose homework had been torn up was one who had trouble with his or her own behavior. The kid that did the tearing up would, at the very least, have to apologize. On our playground a simple "sorry" is not adequate. We need a whole sentence. There are plenty of times when this moment becomes confused with discussion of whatever transgression led to the homework being ripped up in the first place, but the apology takes precedence. After that, if there is a prior complaint, we can look into what happened to set the whole homework abuse experience in motion. There might even be an additional apology from the kid whose homework was destroyed. The bottom line is this: It's never okay to rip up someone's homework.
Why doesn't Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich get this? Maybe they went to private schools where such matters were treated differently, but it is still hard for me to comprehend why these men believe that our President should not apologize for the accidental burning of a number of Qurans in a garbage pit on Bagram Air Base. This set off a wave of violence focused on American personnel in the area, resulting in the deaths of four U.S. soldiers. "The response needs to be apologized for by (President Hamid) Karzai and the Afghan people for attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and overreacting to this inadvertent mistake," Santorum said on NBC's "Meet the Press". "That is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did." Newt said, "It is an outrage that on the day an Afghan soldier murders two American troops, President Obama is the one apologizing." The fact that there were at least thirty Afghan deaths related to the unrest has gone without official mention.
Back when the principal was George W. Pinhead Bush, an American sniper in Afghanistan shot a Koran, peppering the Muslim holy book with bullet holes. At the time, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino had emphasized that it was important to show that the U.S. president "knew that this was wrong." Imagine a John Milius scenario in which Afghan troops invaded a small Colorado town and accidentally burned a few bibles in their garbage pit. I don't guess the Wolverines would stand for it. Unless they were on my playground.