Breaking news!
Republicans will give US juries a brand-new new option–to find a defendant “Not guilty by reason of sounding sincerely sorry. ”
Rove’s latest PowerPoint playbook (leaked yesterday) tells GOP lawmakers it’s getting too hard to play on the heartstrings of people who find out you’ve been abusing their trust.
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I want to make it very clear I am remorseful. I accept the responsibility. Theres no way that I can turn back the clock. And Im not that individual that I was years ago.
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Until the new law gets passed, Rove urges his new crop of GOP felons-to-be to avoid the over-familiarity of “I take responsibility.”
There’s even an online playbook, Rove points out, of less hackneyed ways to say “I don’t want anything bad to happen to me as a result of the bad things I already did to you”:
It was a very very bad thing to have done and I’m really very ashamed of myself. I can only say it won’t happen again. To have murdered so many people in such a short space of time is really awful, and I really am very, very, very sorry that I did it, and also that I’ve taken up so much of the court’s valuable time listening to the sordid details of these senseless killings of mine…
Yep, that’s Episode 27 of Monty Python.
Elsewhere in the leaked file, Rove suggests a new law requiring judges to hand out probation, not prison, when a defendant’s lawyer uses this magic formula:
“Hasn’t my client already been punished enough?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Betsy Devine: Now with even more funny ha-ha and peculiar » Pearls of PR-speak: When bigshots make big mistakes // Jun 19, 2007 at 8:08 am
[…] accept responsibility! Not guilty, your Honor! Let’s give that brave, honest, already-suffering Smithsonian Board of Regents a […]
2 What is even worse than an oxymoron? // Jan 25, 2009 at 3:09 am
[…] But that’s OK, because what I will do is “take full responsibility.” […]