Jay Kuten: When personal responsibility takes a hike

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Mostly it was the season of cliches.
"The first casualty of war is the truth." "Success has many fathers while failure is an orphan." I kept rehearsing these mantras as the news accumulated.
We were to face Judgment Day on May 21, beginning at 6pm. Harold Camping, whose billboards prophesised the coming rapture, never did specify a time zone.
Judgment Day came and apparently went. I did not witness any bodies floating upwards, although some of the faithful had given up jobs and homes to be ready for the Big Day Up.
Camping's calculations may have been a bit off. He's done this before, in 1994 with a similar result. Those believers who gave their cash to Camping may be asking for a refund. Good luck.
As to other fables and religious beliefs, the US Council of Catholic Bishops has released a five-year study on sexual abuse of minors by priests, commissioned at a cost of US$1.8 million. To the surprise of very few, the report lets the Church itself, and to a great degree even the priest-perpetrators, off the hook. The study blames the permissive attitudes of society in the 60s and 70s as the source of priestly misbehaviour responding to stress. It claims that there were no predictive traits that could have helped detect abusive priests and that the priests who abused minors did not show "paedophilic traits".
Of course the report also defines minors - prepubescent children - as those under the age of 10. And the report does not trouble to take into account in its blaming of societal permissiveness, that a serious problem of sexual abuse by priests also took place in Ireland, a Catholic country where permissiveness has hardly bothered to show up.
The report was released in Washington DC. Victims' groups are reportedly talking to Tui regards a billboard.
The execution of Bin Laden brought out the asymmetry between the military precision of Seal Team 6 and the Obama administration's handling of the story.
An overexcited National Security Adviser John Brennan initially told the world Osama used his wife as a human shield and engaged in a "firefight" that cost his life. Then James Carney, Obama's press secretary, had to backtrack. Osama's wife was no human shield but was shot in the leg and Osama was unarmed.
Just in time, that old crowd of Bush fear mongers jumped in to declare that, "See, torture - I mean enhanced interrogation - worked". Too bad for them that while they waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed 187 times, the capture or killing of Osama never happened on their eight-year watch.
The best or worst of all this sorry lot is saved for last - Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Schwarzenegger has deceived the voters of California who were warned of his behaviour with women by the Los Angeles Times before to election. But his enabler was Maria Shriver who "stood by her man" as they excoriated women who made claims about Arnie's fast hands. No sympathy for her now, eight years later, with the Governor's term over.
As to the Frenchman, well, his nickname is "the great seducer". If the charges are proven, he's given seduction a bad name and the French will be having a rethink about Gallic charm.
And, as these two lotharios dominated all other news, the usual suspects of willing psychologists come forward to explain their respective motivations while never having met their objects of psychic dissection.
I hadn't been expecting to be borne upwards with Camping's crowd but I was bemused if hardly enraptured at so many people and institutions playing fast and loose with facts and indeed with faith. Common to all these rather pedestrian behaviours is the more serious undertow of a vast movement away from that most human leavening trait, acceptance of personal responsibility.