Passive Aggressives

President Bush acknowledged today that "mistakes were made" in the US Attorney political purge. You gotta love aggressively employing those passive constructions, particularly when the grammatical subject is the pseudo-contrite word "mistakes" rather than a living, sentient being. How many times have we seen the Bush administration cloud over its malfeasance behind this rhetorical ploy? It's a culpa without a mea, which is nothing other than a culpa nulla.