McBride and WTMJ-AM 620 Fail The Responsibility Test

If I had a dollar for every sanctimonious, preachy mention on conservative blogs and talk radio about "personal responsibility," or "taking responsibility," I'd be ever so much closer to retirement.

It's the Right's mantra, and is often hurled at a variety of liberals, poor people, bureaucrats and all the other individuals and groups that are not living up to the responsible, accountable standards of proper, upright Rightists.

Except when they cut and run the way Jessica McBride and 620 WTMJ-AM radio have done when they erased from McBride's blog all references to the insensitive audio mocking she posted earlier this week about the drive-by murder of four-year-old Jasmine Owens.

McBride and her radio producer thought they were being hilarious when they first played the bit, contained in a juvenile, fake interview with McBride nemesis Eugene Kane, the Journal Sentinel columnist. The audio featured her self-congratulatory chatter.

And she bragged about the radio bit on her blog, too, posting the audio along with more text and threw the whole thing in her podcast section, too, because she wanted readers and other bloggers to know about her handiwork - - until the heat began to come down on this blog, and elsewhere.

I hope someone has saved the audio, because the items have disappeared.

Erased, as can be done on Internet postings.

So it's gone, perhaps. But not forgotten.

For WTMJ-AM, the self-proclaimed "biggest stick in the state," it was an employer-sanctioned, 50,000 watt abuse of the public airwaves - - allowing an employee to poke a big stick in the eye of a community already appalled, but united in grief.

Save for one irresponsible blogger/talker and her employer who failed the personal responsibility test.

Rather than delete the offending items with a keystroke, both McBride and station management should step up publicly, take responsibility, and at least issue an apology.