Which is it, young feller?

Spare a thought for our friends in the trenches of the party press machine, desperate for some guidance as the powers that be argued about bigger things. Is the problem that the Kenyan usurper doesn't have a story (that's the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal, above), or that he does?

The Obama administration rushed Wednesday to portray the swift return of 10 U.S. sailors taken captive a day earlier by Iran as a vindication of the president’s diplomatic outreach to Tehran, but a video showing the disarmed, kneeling American sailors being watched by Iranian guards and one of the sailors apologizing to his captors quickly undercut the administration’s self-congratulatory message.

The "apology video," as it seems to be known at the Times, seems to be the core of the problem. No matter how much officialdom might have denied offering an apology, there's this, as reported by Fox:

“It was a mistake. That was our fault. And we apologize for our mistake,” the sailor said, in a brief state TV clip posted on Twitter by a journalist with Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.

Which sounds a lot more like trying to talk yourself out of a traffic ticket than -- what do you suppose a real state-to-state apology would sound like, The Washington Times?

China released the 24 hostages of a U.S. surveillance plane held for 12 days after receiving a Bush administration letter saying the United States was "very sorry" for the plane's landing on Hainan island without verbal clearance. 

Oh. Well, back to that in a second. As a serious national news organization, of course, the Times is careful to let the usurper's minions deny their guilt:

Top administration officials pushed back strongly at the notion the incident was a sign of weakness and an indictment of President Obama’s approach to Iran. Mr. Kerry credited the incident’s fast resolution to the “critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country secure and strong.”

“We can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago,” when the level of trust between the two capitals was far lower, Mr. Kerry added.

Instead of imagining, why don't we just look back to 2001 and see how a real American president handled things:

President Bush stepped up pressure on China yesterday, telling Beijing "it is time" to release 24 U.S. service members held from what China is calling "protective custody" but which the United States says is detention.

"We have allowed the Chinese government time to do the right thing," Mr. Bush said. "But now it is time for our servicemen and women to return home. And it is time for the Chinese government to return our plane."

President Bush would have disappointed, for example, Ted Cruz, who just proclaimed that anybody capturing US service personnel is gonna pay for it. On the whole, though, which case do you figure might have the evildoers feeling more nervous: the one where the US keeps quiet in public and gets its sailors back the next day, or the one where two weeks of posturing ended in an actual apology?