Jay Bookman

Americans love to talk sports. Polite Americans don't talk religion. So when those two things meet, the news media has no idea what to make of it.

Unfortunately for journalists, sports and religion - Christianity in particular - seem to be publicly mingling more often these days. Some star athletes are more outspoken in their faith, while many others regularly find themselves in need of spiritual, if not legal, redemption.

Liberals in the media don't understand religion and religious people, so when they surface on the playing field, the resulting coverage veers wildly from awkwardly respectful to clueless to downright contemptuous.

Fox's Brit Hume caused a firestorm by suggesting on air that Tiger Woods could find "forgiveness and redemption" in Christianity, rather than the casual Buddhism the golfer has said he practices. Woods, whose marriage and career are in melt-down because of his serial infidelities, should "turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world," Hume said. And in doing so, the former anchorman committed several mortal sins in modern secular America.

Tolerance is a virtue the Left loves to trumpet, except when the intolerable is set forward. In this instance, the intolerable is a gentle Christian evangelistic overture to a celebrity caught in sexual scandal.

Yesterday, Fox News analyst and professing Christian Brit Hume expressed his spiritual concern for Tiger Woods and urged the golf superstar to turn to Christianity for grace and forgiveness during a segment of the January 3 edition of "Fox News Sunday."

For that, Hume is being lambasted by some liberal bloggers, including Atlanta Jounal-Constitution's Jay Bookman who unleashed this venom in a brief three paragraph blog post yesterday afternoon:

Susan Crawford's recent assertions of torture simply do not add up, and your main stream media isn't going to investigate anytime soon.  Had Crawford made an assertion that there was unequivocally no torture to speak of at Guantanamo, the media would be sifting meticulously through her statements with a fine-toothed comb, smearing her reputation at every turn.  Instead, her arguments seemingly confirm what the leftist media has long assumed - that our government has condoned torture tactics - and because of that, everything is taken at face value.

Crawford recently told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that: 

"We tortured (Mohammed al-) Qahtani.  His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

The basic premise of this story however, had apparently been completely refuted in retrospect, back in February of 2008.  By whom?  Why, the Washington Post.

On February 12th, 2008, the Post printed an article titled:

U.S. to Try 6 on Capital Charges Over 9/11 Attacks

New Evidence Gained Without Coercive Tactics

You read that correctly, the staff writers went out of their way to inform the public that the evidence against the 9/11 conspirators was ‘gained without coercive tactics.'