Sincerity.**

The Monday morning chatter about Brit Hume's religious comment yesterday on Fox News Sunday isn't surprising. It's rare we see someone counsel religion, much less speculate which brand of religion might work best for someone hurting.

Hume lost a son in 1998. Non-euphemistically: his 28-year-old son killed himself with a hunting rifle, a night after being arrested in DC for DUI, operating a vehicle when intoxicated. The son -- Sandy -- reportedly left a long note, expressing regret for his actions.

Maybe, in a segment asking what newsworthy predictions or advice he would give -- big-picture topic -- in the sports/entertainment worlds, Hume thought of his son when thinking of Woods' current front-page predicament***. And threw out the idea of self forgiveness, and giving the pain over to a higher power, as a potential way out for young Mr. Woods.

Even on a cynical PR level (which I don't think Hume was operating at), it works. You've got to at least self acknowledge the mistake(s) that caused the pain, in order to push past it. And that calls for humility, which need not be crippling in itself or force a major lifestyle change necessarily. Just a less hypocritical one.

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In a way, the collapse of conservative principles in Congress only heightens the mystery of why Bill Paxon quit*. The post-revolutionary Republican Congress is an environment in which he might well have flourished, and where he ought to have felt very much at home.

*Ironically, on Ash Wednesday 1998:

“Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.... Return to the Lord, your God” (Jl 2:12-13).

**

"But if you want sincerity, you might just as well be blind;
It always seems to be so hard to give...

***

The cover promises "raw" and "never-before-seen" photos inside with an essay by Pulitzer Prize winner Buzz Bissinger, who explores the 33-year-old golfer's fall from grace.

"In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality...." he writes. "He deluded himself into thinking he could be something that he wasn't: untouchable. The greatest feat of his career is that he managed to get away with it for so long in public, the bionic man instead of the human one who hit a fire hydrant."