Signs of the apocalypse

Sports Illustrated used to have this great feature called "Signs of the Apocalypse"; I don't know if it still exists because I haven't been an SI reader for a long time. But the whole idea was they'd find something that occurred that week that was so egregiously insulting to the most basic tenets of reason and logic, without even the barest hint of self-conscious irony, that one might be forgiven for thinking that the end was truly nigh.
That's just by way of saying that I was watching a network evening news program this past week (I think it was NBC), and Brian Williams was leading with Marion Jones and steroids. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course, but after we get the report on her teary press conference, Brian Williams and the woman covering the story get into this exchange which is basically, "Say it ain't so, Marion." The reporter says something to the effect of, I remember watching her win those gold medals in 2000 and being so proud, and now it's like she's thrown it back in our face, and then Williams countering with something along the lines of, How incredibly disappointing, she's let us all down, she's let her country down, etc.
This was also the day that the New York Times had broken the story of the torture memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel after Gonzales took over the DOJ that basically said you could use various combinations of head-slapping, temperature manipulation, food deprivation and waterboarding on terrorism suspects and it would not violate legal prohibitions against "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment, let alone torture. One of the implications of the story was that the Bush Administration had made sure to kick a lot of good people out of the DOJ who had tried to stop them from doing this. So NBC went to footage of Bush's reaction to the Times story. As far as I could tell, he was reclining on a couch, and because he's never been able to speak in complete paragraphs he did his typical thing of saying something and then repeating it several times for effect with the grammar altered. It was something along the lines of: "We are using all legal means to protect the American people. That is our priority, the protection of the American people. And we use the means that are legal to protect them in this war on terror."
Maybe the whole Marion Jones thing didn't hit me as hard as most people, and I can understand being disappointed in her and saying, well, she's setting a bad example for young athletes. But let's put things in perspective: she's an athlete who cheated by using performance enhancing drugs. Bush ordered American intelligence officers to practice torture techniques taken directly from Lubyanka prison or the security services of our putative "allies" in the Middle East, and then stacked the DOJ with cronies and idealogues to make sure it would be deemed "legal". And network news is saying that Marion Jones is the one who let America down?