THE SINS OF TONY BENNETT UNCOVERED

Now let us politically-correct juries take up the inquisition of Tony Bennett. Beloved 85-year-old Anthony Di Benedetto who has sung his way into the hearts of every generation in and beyond San Francisco.

Tony inherited Frank's crown as America's trans-generational musical artist. And all was well until....yes, until the crown slipped a tad this month. In an interview with the crown-less bubble-head Howard Stern, Tony allowed himself a moment of personal honesty. Now right there was his big mistake! In show business, honesty must never come before flattery.

Tony was a decorated GI in WWII...fought in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge...has always worn his Italian-American heart on his sleeve with traditional love of flag and country. But then -- as in the doctrinely-correct Spanish Inquisition of the bloody 15th C -- he permitted a technical heresy to pass his lips.

Tony answered Stern's question about 9/11 with the thought -- simply the thought, mind you! -- that a nation like a person sometimes gets back what it puts out. THAT WAS IT! The phone calls lit up and the columnists flared to collectively mouth the Inquisitional pronouncement: Heresy!

Somehow in some convoluted way, post 9/11 Americans have decided the best way to keep-the-faith is to vocally hate anyone and anything with Islamic undertones. [Come to think of it, the Spanish Inquisition had some of the same madness in mind]. And so it is that an authentic American flag- waver quite suddenly became a political pariah to many of our professional haters. Haters whose rage against anything "un-American" has no room for anyone who ventures the thought that sometimes Americans are themselves un-American as they bestride the world in our role as super-power.

A few years back, the Dixie Chicks met the same fate. Sixty years back we had the un-American inquisitions about Hollywood and later under Joe McCarthy. Ninety years back we had the un-American inquisitions known as the Palmer Raids. One hundred-and-fifty years back we had the un-American inquisitions by the Know Nothing Party.

Well, you get the idea. When things go badly -- in a neighborhood, a city or a nation -- there will always be a few lynch mobs seeking out someone to blame. To blame -- like the heretics and witches of our dark past -- whose destruction will somehow stave off evil and save us all. Even the un-covered evil of 85-year-old singers.