Stephen A. Smith Says He Was Wrong about the COVID-19 Vaccine

Along with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Kennedy, Smith is one of three public figures who were man enough to admit they were wrong about a major policy issue.

A friend just send me a report that prominent sports broadcaster, Stephen A. Smith, has stated he was wrong about the COVID-19 vaccine and apologized to Dallas Mavericks basketball player, Kyrie Irving, whom he’d criticized because Irving (like Novak Djokovic and Aaron Rodgers) refused to get the stupid and dangerous shot.

My friend who sent me the report asked me if I could think of any other major public figures who have subsequently apologized for the role they played in a major public policy blunder.

I immediately thought about former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who in a 1995 speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library stated that he’d been badly wrong to advocate the Vietnam War.

Throughout history, few public figures who have advocated a ruinous policy were later man enough to admit that they were wrong.

Even more impressive than McNamara was President John F. Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. The CIA-backed operation by Cuban exiles failed, resulting in deaths, captures, and a major embarrassment for the new administration. At a press conference, Kennedy referred to the old saying that “victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan” and declared, “I’m the responsible officer of the Government.”

The most famous mea culpa in English history was King Henry II’s apology for inciting the December 29, 1170 murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

The king performed a highly public act of penance on July 12, 1174. He dismounted outside Canterbury, walked barefoot through the streets in penitential clothing (a woolen smock or hair-shirt), entered the cathedral crypt, knelt at Becket’s tomb, confessed that his “incautious words” had caused the killing, and submitted to scourging: five strokes from each of the bishops present and three from each of the roughly 80 monks of Christ Church. He then spent the night fasting and praying at the tomb.

Henry’s act of penance is perhaps the most remarkable example in all of history of the most powerful man in an entire country volunteering to humble himself in a dramatic way that involved receiving corporal punishment from men of far lesser rank.

In our current Age of the Weenie in which we are governed by sadistic psychopaths and perverts, such a spectacular act of genuine humility in one of our high and mighty is inconceivable. Nevertheless, we applaud Stephen A. Smith for his gentlemanly and magnanimous confession and apology.