Careful what you wish for when seeking headlines

If you want to maintain comfortable relations in your personal and professional life, a good rule of thumb is to imagine how what you are saying would sound in the newspaper.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal learned that lesson the hard way this week, with comments that seem almost willfully out of place for a commander of the U.S. Armed Forces. For saying that he felt "betrayed" by the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and engaging with aides who mocked the vice president of the United States. the general in charge of America's force in Afghanistan found himself very publicly put out of a job.

In hindsight, McChrystal found all the right things to say - emphasizing his support for his commander in chief's strategy in Afghanistan and apologizing for disrespectful remarks by him and members of his staff.

But McChrystal's mea culpa is just the latest in a pattern of hindsight corrections that also reaches much closer to home here in Illinois and is becoming almost alarmingly routine.

Perhaps the most prominent recent example is the battle of resumes between Illinois U.S. Senate candidates Alexi Giannoulias and Mark Kirk.

This controversy began with accusations - and eventual acknowledgments - of embellishments, or at least mistakes, by Kirk in the details of his resume. Kirk, a Republican congressman who also is an intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval Reserves, eventually admitted that an award he has been touting regarding his military service was not for himself alone but for his entire unit. Then, he had to also admit that the phrasing of claims that he had served in the Persian Gulf war was inaccurate and should have indicated that he served during the war.

Democrat Giannoulias strove to make great political noise about the discrepancies when, in a game of trading dot-for-tiddle as only politicians can play it, he had to correct his own resume to note that he'd served on a committee for a state bankers association, not on the association's board of directors.

When the game turned back to Kirk and he found himself trying to explain that his monthslong college experience teaching at a nursery school was where he gained first-hand experience with the "brightest lights of our country's future" and his one year teaching in a London private school was where he'd encountered kids who "bore scrutiny as people who might bring a gun to class," a Giannoulias spokesman could only counter that Kirk's revisions had "gone from bizarre to absurd," an observation that unallied readers likely would ascribe to the whole process.

The gulf oil spill crisis has gushed with unfortunate verbal sputterings all its own. The president of BP found himself apologizing for declaring that he wanted to get his life back in the midst of families whose lives will likely never be the same because of his company, BP's board chairman would apologize for referring to those affected by the gulf oil spill as "the small people" that BP truly cares about. Within the space of a couple hours, a U.S. senator would find himself taking back his assertion that BP's $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the spill was a "shakedown."

In all these cases and so many like them, the speakers contritely stressed that they'd meant no harm and that what they'd said was not what they meant. But the overriding common lesson might be that all this contrition would not be necessary if, instead of grabbing for headlines with clever or self-promoting twists of phrase, speakers would consider how those twists will actually sound in a headline.