Yesterday I wondered aloud as to what amount and/or quality of crow Dennis Prager would eat in the wake of his uncommonly silly article on Keith Ellison’s swearing-in ceremony. Via Mary Katharine Ham, we now have the answer: we got an Andrew Sullivan correction (emphasis mine):

To understate the case, my last column, “America, Not Keith Ellison, Decides What Book a Congressman Takes His Oath on,” seems to have touched a national nerve.

It has caused a national discussion – actually, more hate-filled attacks on me than civil discussion – and has been covered by just about all major American news media. To their credit, CNN and Fox News both gave me ample time (in television terms anyway) to express my views on two of each network’s major shows: “Paula Zahn Now” and Headline News on CNN, and “Hannity & Colmes” and “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on Fox News. And many American newspapers have covered it.

It does, however, come dangerously close to a Greenwald correction, minus the irrelevant links:

For the record, because I deem this a significant statement about most of the Left, I found virtually no left-wing blog that was not filled with obscenity-laced descriptions of me. Aside from the immaturity and loathing of higher civilization that such public use of curse words reveal, the fury and hate render the leftist charge that it is the Right that is hate-filled one of the most obvious expressions of psychological projection I have seen in my lifetime.

Not until paragraph six does the poor-me-fest take a brief break to allow the substance of the argument to come in:

Accusation: I am advocating something unconstitutional by demanding that the Bible be included in oaths of office. I am reminded that Mr. Ellison has a right to practice the religion of his choice and that there shall be no religious test for candidates for office in America.

Response: I never even hinted that there should be a religious test.

Right. All you did was say that no one unwilling to swear an oath on a text associated with one particular religion should be allowed to take office. Nope, no religious test there whatsoever. We’ll take all comers: Muslims, Jews, Shintos, whatever, as long as they believe the Bible, or are at least willing to

Sorry, but just because a religious test is so easy that a member of another religion can pass it by compromising his own religion, or a non-religious person can pass it by lying outright, that just makes it a crappy religious test, it doesn’t change the fact that it is one.

I agree with the tens of thousands of office holders in American history who have honored the American tradition — I am well aware it is not a law, and I do not want it to be — of bringing a Bible to their ceremonial or actual swearing-in.

Great. Then how about admitting you screwed up, big time, in saying Ellison should not be allowed to take office unless he brought a Bible to his ceremonial or actual swearing, and should not be allowed take office if he were unwilling to do so, rather than attempting to cover your tracks by pretending you never wrote half the stuff you wrote?

I cannot name any Western European country that does not have a document similar to the American Constitution and something akin to our Bill of Rights.

I can. For starters, try Great Britain, which has no written Constitution, and whose Bill of Rights serves as little more than a neat display at museums. Or Canada’s, whose Bill of Rights expressly endorses reverse discrimination, and can in any event be overriden by Parliament simply by dropping the n-word (“notwithstanding”). [I know, they're not in Western Europe, but they're a lot closer to our structure of government than anybody else.] Indeed, if Prager had spent half as much time researching the issue as he spent writing this silly article, he’d be hard pressed to name a single Western European country that does have a document similar to the U.S. Constitution. With prime ministers selected by Parliament and presidents serving largely ceremonial roles, the separation of powers as we know it is virtually unheard of. With no pesky First Amendment to worry about, states run television and radio, David Irving rots in prison simply for being an a-hole, and hate crime laws apply to what every American would consider protected free speech. Query whether Prager’s own column might be considered a hate crime in some of these Western European countries Prager touts as supposedly having a constitution and/or Bill of Rights similar to ours. Apart from that minor nit, many have constitutions more hospitable to Prager’s views on church and state.

It is, therefore, not the Constitution that has made America unique and a moral beacon to the world’s downtrodden. What has made America unique is the combination of Enlightenment ideas with our underlying Judeo-Christian values.

How does that make us unique? We inherited both “Judeo-Christianity” and the Enlightenment from Europe. If a tradition of either hard-core religious tests of office or ceremonial deism is all it’s cracked up to be, then Europe has us beat hands-down. At the risk of sounding a bit too Prag-ish myself, I cannot name any Western European country that does not have a “Judeo-Christian” tradition combined with Enlightenment ideas.