(Update Added Below)
Change is happening, and its positive effect seems to be everywhere.
David Letterman delivered a sincere apology on his TV show Friday night. In 1993, he ordered that a stand-up routine by the late comic Bill Hicks be edited out of an episode. Now he felt the need to correct that lapse in judgment.
Dave had Bill's mom as a guest, and ran a tape of the never-aired performance as a way of closing the circle.
In Super Bowl Sunday's NY Times Arts and Leisure section, Bruce Springsteen admits that cutting an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart to sell a "Greatest Hits" package was not the thing to do, given his image as a hero to working people and the company's history of anti-union practices.
"It was a mistake," says the Boss. "Fans will call you on that stuff, as it should be."
This is truly a new day in America. President Barack Obama is restoring honor and decency, and suddenly it's a time that demands doing the right thing.
Along these lines, former White House strategist Karl Rove quietly contacted House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers earlier this week to express regrets over failing to testify about various scandals during the Bush presidency.
"I did the wrong thing," Bush's Brain wrote bluntly in a 400 page confessional. "I orchestrated the entire scheme of firing the U.S. Attorneys, and good folks were tarnished in the process. I was so full of myself after having successfully outed a covert CIA officer that I simply couldn't see straight."
No confirmation yet of rumors that George Bush and Dick Cheney have magnanimously decided to forgo their lifetime, taxpayer-funded pensions, as partial atonement for the economic meltdown that occurred on their eight year watch.
UPDATE: Our new era continues. On February 24, media magnate Rupert Murdoch himself -- and this is a first -- personally apologized for an editorial cartoon that ran a week earlier in the New York Post, his conservative tabloid newspaper. The cartoon was ostensibly an anti-stimulus bill message, depicting the author of the stimulus as a monkey shot dead by two cops, one of whom says "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
The paper initially defended the image as nothing more than a tie-in to the incident of a crazed chimpanzee recently killed for attacking a woman.
Unlike the July 21 New Yorker magazine cover that mocked inane conservative talking points by showing Barack and Michelle Obama dressed as Muslim terrorists in the Oval Office (and aptly titled "The Politics Of Fear"), this latest cartoon has no satirical value. Obama, the first African-American president in U.S. history, is a crazed monkey, plain and simple.
Even Rupert Murdoch couldn't stomach it. Things have changed.