Oh, you’re sorry. Well, that makes it OK!

Bashir chose to tell his audience of the diary of a plantation overseer in Jamaica named Thomas Thistlewood.

“In 1756, he records that a slave named Darby ‘catched eating kanes had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, sh** in his mouth.’

“This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of inhumanity. And he mentions a similar incident in 1756, his time in relation to a man he refers to as Punch. ‘Flogged punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper, made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.’”

And that brings Bashir to his disgusting denouement: “When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.”

That’s right. Wrapped in the language of literary allegory, Bashir is saying he’d like to see someone assault and abuse Sarah Palin in this horrifying fashion.

And no one at MSNBC bats an eye? This is deemed acceptable discourse?

What would MSNBC say if a conservative had talked about defecating on, say, Hillary Clinton?

In his televised apology, directed to both Palin and to viewers, Bashir said his remarks were “unworthy” and “deeply offensive,” and that he is “deeply sorry.” He said he wished he had been “more thoughtful” and “more compassionate.” He said “the politics of vitriol and destruction is a miserable place to be and a miserable person to become,” and promised to learn a lesson.

An abject apology is all well and good. But as Mediaite’s Joe Concha writes, invoking MSNBC President Phil Griffin: “Could you imagine if Neil Cavuto or Jake Tapper, who occupy the same timeslot on Fox and CNN, respectively, suggested anyone s*it in anyone’s mouth on national television, as Bashir did last week?

Um, no. But MSNBC is a joke, and everyone knows it. Let’s not go around equating them to responsible journalists or we’ll all just look silly.

Yakety Sax version.

It’s nice to think, anyway. A little hope for change on a Monday morning, from National Journal:

There’s nothing that Democrats want more than to change the subject from Obamacare, despite DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s protestations otherwise. Congressional Democrats don’t want to be dealing with a drip-drip of news about premiums going up, patients losing their doctors, and a broken health care website as they face angry voters in 2014. Hillary Clinton doesn’t want this issue lingering past the midterms. She hitched her presidential prospects to President Obama’s wagon and she’s not about to let someone else’s crisis damage her presidential ambitions yet again, Even Vice President Joe Biden, who called the health care law a “big f—ing deal,” didn’t mention it once at a fundraiser last week for North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan.

Unless the HealthCare.gov website miraculously gets fixed by next month, there’s a growing likelihood that over time, enough Democrats may join Republicans to decide to start over and scrap the whole complex health care enterprise. That became clear when even Obama, to stop the political bleeding, offered an administrative fix that threatened the viability of the entire individual exchange market to forestall a House Democratic mutiny the next day. It was as clear sign as any that the president is pessimistic about the odds that the federal exchange website will be ready by the end of the month, as promised.

More than anything, politics is about self-preservation, and the last two weeks provided numerous examples of how public opinion has turned so hard against the law that even its most ardent supporters are running for the hills.

And now, some humor from SNL, courtesy of Hot Air:

UPDATE: It worked! ObamaCare has been repealed, per Andy Borowitz:

Faced with a barrage of new questions about the Affordable Care Act, President Obama cut short a White House press conference today, telling the stunned press corps, “You know what? Everybody can keep their damn insurance.”

Glaring at the reporters, the President continued, “You heard me. If your insurance is crappy, then you just go ahead and keep it—the crappier, the better. Let’s pretend this whole thing never happened.”

A vein in his forehead visibly throbbing, the President added, “You know, I really wish I hadn’t spent the last three years of my life on this thing. I should’ve just gone around invading countries for no reason. That would’ve made everybody happy. Well, live and learn.”

Heh.