I apologize for not blogging about Richard Mourdock, the Republican State Senate candidate from Indiana who said that pregnancies resulting from rape are “something that God intends to happen.” That was because I missed his apology. Perhaps you missed it too. It came right after he said he “would not apologize.”

You see, on Wednesday, Mourdock doubled down, saying, “I spoke from my heart. And speaking from my heart, speaking from the deepest level of my faith, I would not apologize. I would be less than faithful if I said anything other than life is precious, I believe it’s a gift from God.” But by Thursday he’d apparently had a change of heart (either that, or he’s afraid of John McCain) (either that, or the Romney campaign made a very insistent phone call) and said, “I’m a much more humble person this morning because so many people mistook, twisted, came to misunderstand the points that I was trying to make. I’m confident God abhors violence and rape, if they came away with any impression other than that, I truly regret it. I apologize if they came away, and I have certainly been humbled by the fact that so many people think that that somehow was an interpretation.”

Let’s parse this! 

But first I’m going to go sit in a corner and rock for a while, because this is one of the worst apologies we’ve examined on SorryWatch.

OK, I’m back.

Mourdock isn’t apologizing for his insensitive statement. He’s apologizing because “so many people” “twisted” his intentions. Here’s a basic rule of apologies: you don’t apologize for other people misunderstanding what you meant. You apologize for saying what you said. (“Twisted” is also, of course, a loaded term, implying that everything is calculated to wound him and nothing is about listeners’ genuine horror upon hearing his statement that God wanted actual human beings to become pregnant after being raped.) It’s awesome that he knows (he’s “confident,” even!) that God is anti-rape. But then he delivers the “if” bomb — IF you didn’t get that he has a direct line to God and IF you misunderstood what he was saying because you are obviously not as plugged in to God’s will as he is, well, he is sorry you have that “impression”! Mourdock is also humbled by people not understanding and pillorying him for expressing God’s desires, to which he has a direct line. Like Jesus, who was also misunderstood and pilloried, he seems to forgive us! Yay!

This “apology” does not back away from the original offensive statement in any way, but in fact compounds it by explicitly blaming others for wounding the speaker, rather than accepting any ownership of the problematic nature of the original line.

So: Might there be any situation in which Mourdock’s “apology” is acceptable? My colleague Susan says, “What he said only comes close to working if the next sentence is ‘I need to humbly keep in mind that English is not my first language and I have no idea what I’m saying most of the time. The panda sings orange.'”

Indeed. Mourdock might also have followed up with Steve Martin’s “May I mambo dogface to the banana patch,” the words spoken on the first day of American school by a child whose parents taught him to talk wrong, or with S.J. Perelman‘s “The chicken is on the blackboard,” which the humorist said in Malay while hallucinating on pre-travel typhoid medication.

However, if one’s native language is English, this apology is not only inadequate, it is so offensive as to magnify the sin.