How, when you've done something you really wish you hadn't, to make the bad situation MUCH worse

Some time ago I celebrated a great Molly Ivins apology and castigated Michelle Malkin for her ungracious reception thereof. That post began as follows:

I am so proud of Molly Ivins I could burst. This, people, is how you apologize when you're wrong.

You don't say that you're sorry that other people have misinterpreted your remarks. You don't say that, if (by chance, and miscommunication, and the highly regrettable hypersensitivity of other people) you have offended someone, then you regret the fact that they took offense.

You say, "I was wrong," and, in Molly's exact words, "I am so sorry."

Looking back, I can't believe I originally forgot the "I was just joking" ploy, one of the all-time favorite ways for macho redneck guys to try to get out of having to be so unmanly as to admit (gasp!) that they had actually done something wrong. But fortunately Gawker reminded me of it by providing a practically untoppable of the tactic. ("Yes, of course it's fake! You idiots!") Ironically, Michelle Malkin is in the mix again, this time as the target of Gawker's and Wonkette's tactically foolish malice and Gawker's even more tactically foolish (given Michelle's willingness to behave ungraciously if you'll just give her a chance) attempt to play the "I was just joking" card. Don't these people realize that nobody buys that and you just make yourself look even stupider and lamer when you try it?

I'm interested neither in Gawker (whom I have never read before today) nor Michelle (whom I stopped reading long ago), but in the dynamics of apology and the folly of trying to deal with having been wrong by trying to find a way to pretend you weren't. The history of this particular episode...well, Michelle has an acid tongue and makes no pretense of charity when it comes to "moonbats," which naturally engenders a certain amount of hard feeling amongst her targets. Also, like most people with acid tongues, Michelle has a thin skin and gets the vapors when other people attack her with the same vituperation she so freely wields herself. "Good-natured" is not, I suspect, a response that pops up often when psychologists throw "Michelle Malkin" into a word-association test; and naturally her targets would be delighted by any chance to get some of their own back and smugly enjoy the spectacle of the inevitable head explosion.

Unfortunately, the frame of mind in which one would be delighted by a chance to stick pins in the Malkin voodoo doll, is not a frame of mind that conduces to high mental efficiency. And so, when an enterprising and malicious but not at all competent photoshopper sent to Wonkette a particularly badly done faux image of "Michelle" doing a tame version of a flasher (she raises her T-shirt and -- horrors! reveals the bikini top she is wearing beneath it, the slut!), Gawker and Wonkette fell for it hook, line and sinker -- and proceeded to blog about what a hypocrite Michelle is to have criticized Charlotte Church's morals when she lets people see her in a bikini, by God!

Look, even if Gawker had been joking, she's got to have the mere double-digit IQ that's necessary to realize that nobody other than her mom is going to believe it, and therefore she (or he, I suppose) has to phrase it very carefully. Something along these lines: "You know, I was trying to be funny, but looking back at what I posted I screwed up and came off as totally serious. I apologize very seriously and hope Michelle will forgive my clumsiness and poor judgment." Instead what Gawker says is basically, "All you people who took me seriously are such morons, plus Michelle's really stupid too" -- that is, hey, if anybody's offended, they're the ones who screwed up, not me.

And if you play it that way you never win. Here, let's look at the possible situations and how Gawker could have played it.

1. Gawker was taken in, she meant it as a serious attack on Michelle, and she's totally busted -- and she responds by saying on her blog, "I made a fool of myself. I was taken in by an obvious photoshop, and the reason is that I don't like Michelle and was too eager to jump on an excuse to attack her. Whether Michelle was right or wrong to write that column is irrelevant; I have the responsibility to make sure I have my facts straight before I attack somebody's character, and in this case I absolutely did not. I apologize to Michelle without qualification. I was foolish and wrong." By this apology she earns respect from reasonable people from all parts of the political spectrum, and either she totally silences Michelle, or else the next time Michelle says anything snarky about the whole incident, it's Michelle who looks like an ungracious bitch. The high ground is totally seized by Gawker and the only thing Michelle can do is try to join her on the high ground by accepting her apology graciously. (What do you think the odds are that Michelle would respond that way? Yeah, me too. Golden opportunity totally missed by Gawker there, I have to believe.)

2. Gawker really was serious, but doesn't want to have to confess to it. So, being dishonest but shrewd, she pretends that she was joking, but she offers a hypocritically humble apology for presenting her "joke" so incompetently. She doesn't defend herself; she just says, "I'm so sorry that I presented that material that I meant to be humorous, so clumsily that it came across as totally serious and was taken seriously by other people. That was terrible and careless writing and I very deeply regret the bad effect it has had on Ms. Malkin..." yadda yadda yadda. By this tactic she would cut the ground out from under Michelle and her defenders (assuming she could write the apology convincingly), and thus stop the bleeding, as it were, without having to admit that she actually was taken in herself and piled gleeful malice on top of moronic stupidity.

3. Gawker really meant the whole thing as a parody and just did a really incompetent job of it, resulting in a post that nobody short of a mind-reader would recognize as parody. She handles this exactly the same way as #2. The results are the same as #2, but in this case she doesn't incur the guilt of dishonesty and hypocrisy.

4. Gawker was taken in totally -- or she was doing a clumsy parody -- either way, it doesn't matter...but she decides to play it by saying, "Hey, I was obviously joking, and anybody who thinks I was serious must be a total moron. Plus Michelle's really stupid." Ta-da! We have a loser. Because nobody's going to buy it; people will still think she was stupid enough to fall for the lousy fake and malicious enough to try to use it to attack Michelle, and now they'll add to Gawker's list of flaws the "fact" that she's not grown-up enough to apologize and not smart enough to come up with something better than the lame ol' "can't-you-take-a-joke" routine.

Guess which way Gawker chose to play it? [sigh]

Note: this post is a slight rewrite of comments I made in updating the original post.