It's a different kind of course. And they've got five apples?

Don't blame us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples, the few rogue soldiers.

Defenders of President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the military emphasize the difficulty of the task they face in Iraq, human frailty and fallibility, and the fact that there are always a few rotten apples.

But both of these two embarrassing examples, I think, don't highlight what I think is most embarrassing about the mistakes that humans make, which is that we'd like to think that the mistakes we make are really just the result of a couple bad apples or a couple really sort of FAIL Blog worthy decisions.