Nostra Culpa As any reasonably

Nostra Culpa

As far as we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are concerned, our humble “weblog” has never made a mistake. Okay, okay: Every once in a blue moon we commit some sort of grammatical peccadillo; or perhaps we spell sumthing rong. These, naturally, are minor sins in comparison with, say, the entire oeuvre of Jayson Blair.

Even so, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” pine and yearn to become one of the media’s big boys—a paragon of journalistic integrity. Kind of like The New York Post, only respectable.

Accordingly, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have decided to offer an intermittent series of posts in which we apologize for defamation, libel, and kindred minor lapses in judgment. In truth, of course, we’ve never stooped to such levels of skullduggery. In order to be taken really seriously by such beacons of integrity as The Daily Mirror, however, we’re compelled to invent some faults.

Without further ado, then, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” humbly offer the first in our intermittent series of dubious apologetics and ritual self-flagellations:

1. In an uninspired post we published long ago, we made manifold references to the ponderosity of Michael Moore. In fact, we insinuated that he was a Marxist in regard to everything but the doughnuts. Although this may technically be true (we’d blithely put money on it), it wasn’t very pleasant. So, to all of our readers who head to “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” in order to get a daily fix of happiness, we most humbly apologize.

2. In an uninspired post we published long ago, we ridiculed comparative literature graduate students. More specifically, we mocked their pseudo-radical sartorial choices and their obnoxious moral preening. Although we firmly believe that everything we wrote was dead-on, we may have led our readers to believe that we were a collection of WASP oppressors, whose castigation of lowly radicals stems from our deep-seated desire to maintain the status quo. This is entirely unfounded: Roughly 47 percent of the crack young staff is not Protestant.

3. Upon the “death” of academic guru Jacques Derrida, our friends the Llama Butchers hoped that we would make fun of the late doyen of deconstruction. We would have done so, yet we figured that, since language is an imperfect system and the signifier has an arbitrary relationship to the signified, it is impossible to state unequivocally that Jacques Derrida is dead. In proper postmodern form, we could note that “Jacques Derrida” is “dead,” but we figured that simply wouldn’t cut the proverbial mustard with the Llamas. We deeply regret this omission.

We don’t know about you, dear reader, but we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” feel a lot better about ourselves. We’re really glad we got this off our collective chest. Now we can return to our usual schedule of preaching to the converted and utterly misinforming the public.